Everyday Listening to Music and Emotion Among College Students

Abstract

This study attempted to reveal the relationship between everyday listening to music and emotion among col-lege students. Participants were 13 female and 2 male college students who were given booklets to record the following over an 8-day period: dates and times of their everyday experiences of listening to music, duration of listening, locations and contexts of listening, active or passive listening, emotions before and after listening, and tiles and artists to which they listened. Results indicated that the participants listened to music for 5 to 30 minutes while driving or riding in a car. Emotions reported both before and after listening to music were mainly ‘happy’, ‘calm’, and ‘dull’. When participants listened to music actively, their emotions before and after listening to music were essentially the same as the above. With respect to the relation between emotions before listening to music and characteristics of the music they chose to listen to, when feeling ‘sad’, ‘anxious’, or ‘lonely’ before listening, they actively chose music having positive as well as negative affective characteristics. These results suggest that their music use in part reflects the iso-principle.