Music as Medicine
This page is a homepage for published papers and journals using sound therapy in the field of medicine.
Music listening as promoter of emotional processing
The special potential of music to facilitate the processing of complex negative emotions is supported by music psychology research. Music listening has been shown to induce complex emotional experiences [22, 23], and to support elaborate self-regulatory processing of sometimes difficult, personal emotional states in everyday life [24]. Furthermore, music is often characterised—somewhat paradoxically—by pleasurable experiences of difficult emotions, such as sadness [25]. It has been argued that the enjoyment of sadness in music is explained by the capacity of music to allow simultaneous absorption, yet dissociation, from the affective content [26, 27]. Music characteristically allows access to various degrees of emotional nuances and intensities with simultaneous self-reflection, detachment, and elaborative awareness of these emotional nuances [28], supporting both experience and conceptual awareness of feelings [29]. Overall, the findings support the idea that music holds special potential for the self-reflective processing of complex, difficult, and even painful emotions.