Music and health: Physical, mental, and emotional

Abstract

Music can heal, recover, and empower. This chapter elaborates on the mechanisms that explain how music serves as a means for promoting physical, mental, and emotional health, across different individuals and the multitude of everyday life situations. Music holds major potential for impacting healthrelevant aspects of human behavior such as the reward system activation, emotion regulation, stress reduction, activation of cognitive-motor behavior, and social interaction. Yet, effective utilization of the health-promoting affordances of music is also strongly dependent on the individual and contextual factors, and the chapter stresses the relevance of understanding the health-impact of music as an interactive engagement with consideration for individual differences. The chapter will present examples from recent research that is rapidly uncovering the mechanisms that link musical engagement to everyday life health and wellbeing and discuss the relevance of this knowledge for personal healthpromotion and preventive interventions.