The effect of music type on emotion regulation: An emotional Stroop experiment

Introduction: Emotion regulation, the process of changing one’s emotion is necessary for efficiency when performing cognitive tasks, and is often measured using a Stroop task that provides conflict between emotional and factual information. Researchers have found that listening to music increases performance on cognitive tasks, and we hypothesized that listening to music samples that evoke different arousal and valence levels will affect participants’ emotion regulation skills. Method: Georgia State University undergraduates (N = 38) completed an emotional Stroop task while they listened to three-minute excerpts of film scores known to evoke particular moods and arousal states. They categorized words according to color, ignoring to the degree possible the irrelevant context and meanings of the words or the moods evoked. Results: We performed a repeated measures ANOVA and found a significant difference as a function of music type, and also an interaction between music type and word context. However, there were no additional significant effects or interactions, including on the magnitude of Stroop interference. Discussion: These results provide evidence that music evokes different arousal and valence states, which may have a distinct effect on emotion regulation skills. In the present study however, the effects of background music were general, and not specific to any word-type X music-type interaction. That is, background music affected performance on the Stroop task, but did not specifically affect the cognitive-control processes that are believed to modulate the magnitude of Stroop-like interference.