Interventions for stress reduction and health promotion
Stress is part of our everyday life – chronic and repeated exposure to stressors can, however, negatively impact our mental and physical integrity. It is therefore crucial to find ways to effectively deal with stress in daily life and thus, promote mental and physical health. By investigating various interventions for stress reduction and health promotion, we aim to study their biopsychological effects on stress-related outcomes and their benefits for the mind and body. We are interested in different approaches to cope with stress and conduct studies both in the lab and the field. We combine ambulatory assessment interventions and biological measurement techniques. By using our state-of-the-art equipment, we assess psychophysiological, endocrine, immune, and genetic parameters to explore the effects of innovative interventions on the various dimensions of stress.
Ongoing Projects
Background
Music listening is an easy-to-administer activity that is associated with lower levels of biological and self-reported stress, according to previous experimental and recent ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies. Building upon these previous findings, we developed an ecological momentary music intervention (EMMI) aiming at alleviating stress in everyday life.
The project
The EMMI is a smartphone-based intervention that provides the opportunity to listen to self-selected relaxing music when feeling stressed as participants go through their everyday life, i.e. music is provided just-in-time, when most needed. Besides subjective stress, saliva samples are used to measure effects on biological stress indicators (cortisol, alpha-amylase). In addition, we implemented various applications to track the participants’ music listening behavior and background music.
Team
Background
Music listening is an effective tool in pain and stress management. Some music-related characteristics are suspected to have specific impact on health-related outcomes. One of these is concerning the selection of the music. Even though participant-selected music is often recommended for clinical use, more studies are needed to find out if participant-selected music really has stronger pain- and stress-reducing effects than music that is chosen by researchers. Also, inherent components of the music might have an impact on pain and stress reactions. As such, frequency-related components are potentially capable of influencing stress and pain parameters. More research is needed to find out if the modulation of frequencies has additional positive effects on pain and stress reactions.
The project
Healthy participants are randomly allocated to one of three groups (with participant-selected music, researcher-selected music, researcher-selected music with additional modulations in frequency-related components). In each group, participants come to our lab 10 times and listen to music for one hour during each session. Additionally, a baseline, post and follw-up assessment are conducted. Pain is induced by the cold pressor test. Pain intensity, pain tolerance, parameters of heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, hair cortisol, and subjective stress are measured.
A trial registration by Feneberg et al. (last update posted 2019) of the project is available under the following link: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02991014
The published study protocol by Feneberg et al. (2020) is available here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.518316/full
Team
Background
Music listening increases pain tolerance and reduces unpleasantness. However, effects are small and inconsistent, which might be due to an unclear understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the effects of music listening on pain. We therefore focus on how people engage with music, specifically absorption, which is a deep, sustained, and typically inwardly focused engagement with the present moment or experience. Qualitative descriptions of music-based analgesia, where people report that they ‘zone out’ or ‘feel transported’ align with the above-mentioned definition of music absorption, highlighting its potential as a key pain-reducing mechanism.
The project
We investigate the role of absorption as an underlying mechanism of music listening during pain experience and whether it is a distinct mechanism from distraction and mind wandering. Because musical preferences vary and absorption is expected to be highest with liked music, participants will submit self-selected music pieces they like and dislike. To enhance generalizability, we will collect data in Dublin (Ireland, in collaboration with Dr. Claire Howlin) and Vienna (Austria).
We will measure pain tolerance via hand-submersion time in the cold pressor test and assess pain and stress experience with self-report scales. Distraction, mind-wandering, and state absorption will be measured with self-report. Absorption will also be captured by eye movements (i.e., microsaccades, blink rate), previously found as indicators of musical absorption (Lange et al., 2017; 2022).
The preregistration of the project is available here:
Fekete, A., Howlin, C., Mikuni, J., & Nater, U. (2026, March 20). The Role of Absorption in Music Listening for Pain Management. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/T3AHY
Team