Tunes Inspire Confidence

Previous research has established that music can have positive effects on people, ranging from enhancing learning and motivation to reducing physical pain. Dennis Hsu, from Northwestern University (Illinois, USA), and colleagues explored whether music can transform the psychological state of the listener. The researchers first pre-tested 31 pieces of music from several genres, such as sports music, hip-hop, and reggae, to see how powerful participants felt listening to 30-second clips. From this pre-test, they identified the highest power and lowest power songs. Songs rated as powerful included Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready for This,” while songs rated lower in power included songs such as Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can” and Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Then, in a series of experiments, the researchers looked at how the highest and lowest rated power songs affected both people’s sense of power and three previously identified psychological and behavioral consequences of power: the tendency to see the forest instead of the trees (thought abstraction), perceived control over social events (illusion of control), and the desire to move first in competitive interactions. The team found that the high-power music not only evoked a sense of power unconsciously, but also systematically generated the three downstream consequences of power. Importantly, the researchers also ruled out lyrics as the cause of the effects, separately asking people to rate how powerful the lyrics made them feel. The team also conducted separate experiments to look at one structural component of music that might explain the music-power effect: bass levels.   In the bass experiments, the researchers asked participants to listen to novel instrumental music pieces in which bass levels were digitally varied. In one experiment, they surveyed participants about their self-reported feelings of power, and in another, they asked them to perform a word-completion task designed to test implicit, or unconscious, feelings of power. They found that those who listened to the heavy-bass music reported more feelings of power and generated more power-related words in the implicit task than those listening to the low-bass music. The study authors submit that: ‘This research expands our understanding of music’s influence on cognition and behavior and uncovers a novel antecedent of the sense of power.”