Background & Aims
Music and simple movement have become important non-pharmacological approaches for pain management due to their economic, safety, and convenience advantages. It has been suggested synchronization of movement to music reduces pain (Werner et al., 2023). Evidence from neuroimaging studies further validates their analgesic effects separately and reveals distinct neural mechanisms (Lu et al., 2021; Lu et al., 2023). Therefore, it is possible to combine music and movement to regulate pain at multiple levels (i.e., via both peripherally and centrally neural modulation). Additionally, movement to music and rhythm promotes the sense of pleasure, as groove is associated with increased activity in brain regions involved in the reward system, such as the nucleus accumbens (Matthews et al., 2020). From this perspective, the present study aims to examine the auditory-motor synchronization-induced analgesic effect and to explore the possible link between pain reduction and music reward sensitivity.
Methods
To demonstrate the superimposed effect of music (i.e., percussion excerpts extracted from a tutorial with drumset) and simple movements (i.e., drumming) on pain perception, we first recruited 80 participants and randomly assigned each of them to receive one of the four experimental interventions (i.e., silence, drumming-only, listening-only, and drumming-and-listening). Before and after the 5-minute intervention, all participants were asked to evaluate their emotional states and underwent pain rating tasks, in which they were asked to rate pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings on a 0–10 NRS after receiving each painful laser stimulus (Experiment 1). An additional 66 participants were recruited to investigate whether the synchronicity of music and movements (i.e., synchrony, asynchrony, and random) was a determining factor in the combined analgesic effect and whether it is associated with music reward sensitivity (Experiment 2).
Results
A superimposed effect of rhythmic auditory sequence and drumming on pain perception was found in Experiment 1, as the pain reduction was significantly larger in the drumming-and-listening group than in the other three groups (all p < 0.001). Furthermore, the positive affect was significantly increased, and the negative affect was significantly decreased in groups involving listening (i.e., listening-only and drumming-and-listening groups; all p < 0.05) when compared with silence and drumming-only groups. In Experiment 2, participants receiving synchronized or asynchronized auditory-motor intervention reported greater pain and unpleasantness reduction, when compared those in the random group (both p < 0.05). More importantly, we found that the change in pain ratings was correlated with music reward sensitivity (p < 0.05). Specifically, the more sensitive to music reward, the greater pain reduction, suggesting a crucial role of music reward sensitivity.
Conclusions
The present study showed that non-pharmacological intervention involving music and movement synchronization is an effective approach for pain reduction and emotion regulation, and the analgesic effect is associated with music reward sensitivity. These findings indicate significant advantages of music and movement combination in pain management, providing new ideas for future clinical pain relief.
References
Lu, X., Hou, X., Zhang, L., Li, H., Tu, Y., Shi, H., & Hu, L. (2023). The effect of background liked music on acute pain perception and its neural correlates. Human Brain Mapping, 44(9), 3493–3505.
Lu, X., Yao, X., Thompson, W. F., & Hu, L. (2021). Movement-induced hypoalgesia: behavioral characteristics and neural mechanisms. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1497(1), 39-56.
Matthews, T. E., Witek, M. A., Lund, T., Vuust, P., & Penhune, V. B. (2020). The sensation of groove engages motor and reward networks. NeuroImage, 214, 116768.
Werner, L. M., Skouras, S., Bechtold, L., Pallesen, S., & Koelsch, S. (2023). Sensorimotor synchronization to music reduces pain. PLoS One, 18(7), e0289302.
Presenting Author
Xinyu Pan
Poster Authors
Topics
- Treatment/Management: Pharmacology: Psychological and Rehabilitative Therapies