Youtube Happy Music
Gema Shisila
Copyright: 2017 Ritter, Ferguson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
In the remaining part of the introduction we will put the study into context by providing theoretical background related to creativity, the effects of music listening on cognition, and on mood and creativity.
In the current study, we aim to extend the sparse literature on the potential association of music listening for optimizing creative cognition. This project is unique, as it is the first to experimentally test whether listening to specific types of music, as compared to a silence control condition, facilitates creative cognition. Additionally, we structurally manipulate valence and arousal of the music, and we expose participants to the music excerpt while performing the creativity task and not before performing the creativity task. Importantly, creativity is measured by both divergent and convergent creativity tasks. Based on previous research, we hypothesize that positive and activating (i.e., happy) music facilitates divergent thinking. Due to scarce and inconsistent research findings, no specific hypotheses were formulated for the effect of calm, sad and anxious music on divergent thinking, as well as for the effect of music on convergent thought.
A 2 x 5 mixed measures design was utilised with creative performance (divergent thinking, convergent thinking) as the within subjects variable and music condition (happy, sad, calm, anxious, silence) as the between-subjects variable.
Fluency is a measure of creative production and represents the total number of ideas generated. To assign a fluency score, the number of ideas a participant listed are counted. Only complete (i.e., no unfinished) ideas were included in the fluency score.
Usefulness is one of the core characteristics of a creative idea and refers to its effectiveness and practicality [49]. The trained rater assigned all ideas a score on usefulness, ranging from not at all useful (= 1) to very much useful (= 5). The second trained rater assigned 30% of the listed ideas a usefulness score. The inter-rater reliability of the ratings was calculated using a 2-way random intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) analysis for consistency, and it was considered good (ICCUsefulness = .883). Per participant, a usefulness sum score was calculated by adding the scores of the ideas a participant generated.
Convergent thinking tests measure whether a participant succeeds in coming up with the best, well-established, or correct answer to a problem where an answer readily exists [50]. In the current study convergent thinking is tested by means of the Idea Selection Task, Remote Associates Task and Creative Insight Task.
During the Idea Selection Task, participants were presented with 10 inventions for the kitchen, and were asked to select the three most creative inventions from this list of pictures. The instructions during the task advised participants that a creative invention should be both original and useful. Once participants had selected the three inventions they considered most creative, these items were re-presented and participants had to arrange the three items in order of creativity. Each selected invention (1st, 2rd and 3rd most creative) was assigned a creativity score, based on expert ratings, resulting in an Idea Selection Score (the creativity score of the idea selected as most creative idea) and a Mean Idea Selection Score (the mean creativity score of the ideas selected as most, second most and third most creative idea).
To obtain data about pre-existing mood, participants were presented with 22 emotion-words that varied on mood and arousal (positive-activating, positive-deactivating, negative-activating, negative-deactivating; for example, happy, calm, angry, sad; see [33]) and had to indicate how much of each emotion they had experienced since they got up on the day of participating using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). Each of the 22 mood items were presented in English and accompanied with the term in Dutch.
First, participants completed the mood questionnaire. Thereafter, creative task performance was measured using the Alternative Uses Task, the Idea Selection Task, the Remote Associates Task, and Creative Insight Tasks, in that order. Each task was set to a total of 3 minutes, such that participants could spend up to three minutes on each task. If they completed the idea selection, RAT, or Creative Insight tasks in less than three minutes, they could proceed to the next section. After completing the four creativity tasks, participants completed the music and demographics questionnaires. At their completion of the study, participants were debriefed and awarded course credit or payment for their participation.
Participants completed the study individually in cubicles, and the lights were slightly dimmed so that the level of brightness was equal across the cubicles used. During the completion of the study, the experimenter was sitting in a room outside of the cubicle, and participants could ask the experimenter for help if any instructions were unclear.
Mean of the Overall divergent thinking (ODT) score during the Alternative Uses Task in the happy music and silence control condition. Error bars represent Standard Error of the Mean. Significant differences between conditions at p < .05 are represented with *.
The current study provides support to the creative cognition model of creativity (for example [9]), which states that individual differences in creativity can be explained by variations in the efficiency of cognitive processes underlying creativity, and to the idea that creative thinking can be enhanced [10, 12].
As mentioned earlier, we assume that the performance difference on the divergent and convergent creativity tasks in the happy music condition can be ascribed to difference in task demands of divergent (generating as many ideas as possible) and convergent (finding one correct answer) creativity. However, given that when performing the convergent creativity tasks, participants were exposed to the happy music for the second time, we cannot rule out habituation as an alternative explanation for the performance difference. In the current study, we compared the effect of four different types of music (high vs. low arousal, and positive vs. negative mood) on creative performance in a between-subject design, that is, participants were either assigned to one of the four music conditions or to the silence control condition. Given that we already employed 5 conditions, divergent and convergent creativity was used as a within-subject task, that is, each participant first performed the divergent creativity task while listening to the specific music excerpt (or, in the control condition, performed the task in silence) and, thereafter, performed the convergent creativity tasks while listening to the same music excerpt (or, in the control condition, performed the task in silence). As the convergent tasks can be frustrating if the tasks are not solved, and hereby influence subsequent task performance, the convergent tasks were always performed after the divergent task. Future research could employ only one type of music, happy music, and could include creativity task (divergent vs. convergent) as a between-subject factor. If, as we assume, task demands and not habituation account for the difference in findings between the divergent and convergent tasks, a beneficial effect of music listening should be observed for the divergent but not for the convergent creativity task.
As many people benefit from creative thinking, and we wish these results to have an as wide applicability as possible, our participants were primarily college age adults and not people already involved in creative work. However, the participant sample had a high education level and a relatively high proportion of females and westerners, which could limit the ecological validity of this study. Findings of a meta-analysis [12] suggest that creativity enhancement may be more effective in organizational than academic settings and may have greater effects on men than on women. Considering that this study relied on a population and setting for which the a priori chance of finding a stimulation effect was not high, the ecological validity and generalizability of the current findings may be enhanced. Nevertheless, it is still unknown what impact such training would have on eastern participants and on other age groups, for example, school-aged children and elderly people. Future research could examine the effect of music listening in eastern cultures and for other age groups. Moreover, follow-up research could study the moderating role of educational background, such as music experience. Given that even for those not genuinely interested in music an effect of music listening was found on creative thinking, we expect this effect to be even stronger for musicians.
In the last couple years of middle school, I had just discovered the wonders of wearing headphones at all times. As I became an older teenager, I switched from my obsession with Katy Perry to Pink Floyd and other figures of classic rock. It was also during those years that my depression developed.
Sophia is an internationally published author with her book Primeira Pessoa, as well as a young classical singer. Born and raised in Brazil, music, writing, and Astronomy are her greatest passions. She believes the greatest role of a writer is to bring forth the truth, the honesty, and the humanity that echoes within each one of us. Journalism, while Art, is for her a portrait of the fraternity of the Earth. At the moment, she works for both The Seattle Collegian and the M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery, while completing her AA degree with a focus on Anthropology & English.
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