Emotion, Personality, Use of Music In Everyday Life and Musical Preferences

Abstract

The use of music in everyday life (UofM) is an area with growing interest. Scales for the measurement can be criticized despite their reliability and validity. Additionally, the association of UofM with personality theories has not been carried out thoroughly. Within an ongoing project, the IAAM (Inventory for the measurement of Activation and Arousal modulation by Music) has been constructed. Within the existing study, the reliability and validity of the IAAM-scales are to be examined. The assignment of the IAAM-scales to the biological based BIS-BAS-model (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) should be proven against the explanation of the IAAM-scales by the personality model of Eysenck (1967). Further hypotheses derived from the IAAM-model and past studies are to be tested. 180 undergraduate students completed the IAAM EPP-D, PANAS, BIS/BAS-Questionnaire and the GWPQ-S. Musical preferences were also recorded. Beside item and scale analyses, explorative orien-tated hypotheses of the scale-personality association were examined by correlation analyses. Using stepwise hierarchical regression analyses, the assignment of the IAAM-scales to both competing biological personality models were tested. Results show that all Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the IAAM-scales are lying above 0.84. The correlation analyses partially confirm the assumed dependencies between the IAAM-scales, person-ality and music preferences. Regression analyses do not clearly support the integration of IAAM scales into the BIS-BAS-model. Further analyses due to a general problem in measuring the theoretical supposed structure of the personality space by means of used personality questionnaires. Beside this theoretical problem, the IAAM-scales again seem to be reliable and valid and do have strong personality dependencies. This means that the learned strategies of UofM serve as an action theoretical approach to link the effects of music on the brain emotionally with personality based affect susceptibility and behavior.