Our national disease and music

The present doctoral thesis work investigated the perception and preferences of emotions in music by depressed patients and the efficacy of improvisational, individual music therapy for depression. Results are very well.

Depression is a highly prevalent mood disorder and a disabling disease in Finland. The Illnes causes problems such as a reduction in quality of life and loss of general functioning.
To investigate how depressed patients differ in their perception of emotions conveyed by musical examples, both depressed (n=79) and non-depressed (n=30) participants were presented with a set of 30 musical excerpts, representing one of five basic target emotions, and asked to rate each excerpt using five Likert scales that represented the amount of each one of those same emotions perceived in the example.

Accordin to doctoral thesis, with will be published by Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities, to investigate how depressed patients differ in their preferences for music excerpts, both depressed and non-depressed participants were presented with 2 sets of 30 musical excerpts that represented the basic emotions - anger, sadness, and happiness - as well as different points on the 2-dimensional model of emotions - valence and energetic arousal.
The main RCT-study showed that participants receiving music therapy and standard care showed greater improvement than those receiving standard care only in depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms and general functioning at 3 months follow-up.

We designed a novel experiment to test the hypothesis that depressed patients' preferences for emotional stimuli also demonstrate this tendency. The response rate was significantly higher in music therapy with standard care than in standard care only, Tri Marko Punkanen said with Sage Journal online.
In sub-study 1 depressed patients showed moderate but consistent negative self-report biases both in the overall use of the scales and their particular application to certain target emotions, when compared to non-depressed controls. In sub-study 2 depressed patients were found to dislike music that was highly energetic, arousing, or angry.

Individual music therapy combined with standard care is effective for depression among working-age people with depression. The results of this study along with the previous research indicate that music therapy with its specific qualities is a valuable enhancement to established treatment practices.

Depressed patients’ negative emotional bias with musical stimuli in sub-study suggests that the evaluation of emotional qualities in music could become a means to discriminate between depressed and non-depressed subjects.
Seems like that the practical implications of diagnostic uses of such perceptual evaluations, as well as a better understanding of the emotional regulation strategies of the patients.