Background & Aims

Music interventions can effectively relieve pain(1) but the therapeutic application of music is limited by a lack of known mechanisms of action(2). Pleasant music has been shown to be the most effective for pain relief(3), suggesting that while music may distract attention, positive emotions may also play a vital role in musics efficacy. We aimed to investigate how mechanisms of attention and emotion produce hypoalgesia, hypothesizing an interaction effect between the demands of a challenging cognitive task and the emotions elicited by pleasant music.

Methods

For each condition (unfamiliar pleasant music(4), scrambled music, silence) 68 participants completed 3 minutes of passive listening followed by 20 randomized trials of two cognitive tasks. One task (the 2-back) was a challenging working memory task where a sequence of letters is presented one at a time and participants judge whether the current letter is the same as the one shown 2 letters prior. The easier control condition (Left-Right) involved indicating whether an arrow on the screen faced left or right. During each of the 20 cognitive task trials, participants received painful thermal stimulations and provided ratings of pain intensity and unpleasantness on a 0-100 visual analogue scale following each stimulation. Pain ratings were analysed using a two-way repeated measures ANOVA comparing task types and acoustic conditions.

Results

We found a significant effect of task type and acoustic condition on pain ratings, but the interaction effect was not significant. Pain was rated highest during the scrambled music condition across both task types. Surprisingly, pleasant music did not decrease pain compared to silence.

Conclusions

These results conflict with abundant research demonstrating pleasant music’s analgesic effects, suggesting that our study’s music-pain-task paradigm nullified the effect of pleasant music by interfering with musical immersion. Performing a difficult cognitive task led to reduced pain ratings, but we were unable to make inferences about the role of pleasant music as a facilitator of this distraction.

References

1. Garza-Villarreal EA et al. (2017) Music-Induced Analgesia in Chronic Pain Conditions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Pain Physician.
2. Lee, J. H. (2016). The Effects of Music on Pain: A Meta-Analysis.
Journal of Music Therapy
3. Roy, M., Peretz, I., & Rainville, P. (2008). Emotional valence contributes to
music-induced analgesia. Pain.
4. SARL Music Care. (2018). MUSIC CARE©. [Mobile application software]

Presenting Author

Elise Desbarats

Poster Authors

Elise Desbarats

BSc(Hons)

McGill University

Lead Author

Ajar Diushekeeva

Universite de Montreal

Lead Author

Todd Vogel

University of Birmingham

Lead Author

Topics

  • Mechanisms: Psychosocial and Biopsychosocial