People more prone to boredom performed better without background music
Given how many of us listen to music while studying or doing other cerebral work, you'd think psychology would have a set of clear answers as to whether the practice is likely to help or hinder performance. In fact, the research literature is rather a mess (not that that has deterred some enterprising individuals from making
bold claims).
There's the largely discredited "Mozart Effect" - the idea that listening to classical music can boost subsequent IQ,
except that when first documented in the 90s the effect was on spatial reasoning specifically, not general IQ. Also, since then the finding has not replicated, or it has proven weak and is probably explained as a simple effect of music on mood or arousal on performance. And anyway, that's about listening to music and
then doing mental tasks,
rather than both simultaneously. Other research on listening to music
while we do mental work has suggested it can be distracting (known as the "irrelevant sound effect"), especially if we're doing mental arithmetic or anything that involves holding information in the correct order in short-term memory.
Now, in the hope of injecting more clarity and realism into the literature, Manuel Gonzalez and John Aiello have tested the common-sense idea that
the effects of background music on mental task performance will depend on three things: the nature of the music, the nature of the task, and the personality of the person. "We hope that our findings encourage researchers to adopt a more holistic, interactionist approach to investigate the effects of music (and more broadly, distractions) on task performance," they write in their
new paper in
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
The researchers recruited 142 undergrads (75 per cent were women) and asked them to complete two mental tasks. The simpler task involved finding and crossing out all of the letter As in a sample of text. The more complex task involved studying lists of word pairs and then trying to recall the pairs when presented with just one word from each pair.
Comment: With so much information circulating on the harmful effects of stress, it's nice to see a more realistic and balanced perspective. Any challenge is inherently stressful, so without stress, there would be no growth, learning or expanding of knowledge. Learning to deal with stress in beneficial ways by shifting our attitudes toward it, seeing it as an opportunity to learn and grow, is one of the keys to not succumbing to the detrimental effects of stress. Don't wish for an easy life, but for the strength to overcome and grow from the obstacles thrown in your way.
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