Listening to concerts often affects mental health

(Photo from Sina)

How to regulate emotions is one of the most important factors in managing mental health. Clinical music clinicians have long known that music has an important influence on human emotions. Music clinicians use music in their classes to improve customer mood and even help them to alleviate some emotional disorders such as depression. But for those who listen to music every day, it is still unclear how the habit of listening to music affects their mental health.

Researchers from Finland and Denmark conducted a study to establish a habit of listening to music, a link between mental health and listening to the neural responses of different types of music through a combination of behavioral and neuroimaging.

The researchers first conducted a mental health assessment of participants in the study to determine if there were symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and nervousness, as well as how they usually interpret emotions by listening to music.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that listening to some sad or offensive concerts made people more anxious and nervous. This phenomenon is more prominent among the men involved in the study. The researchers concluded that listening to some negative concerts led to the breeding of some negative emotions that would not make people feel better. Therefore, the researchers decided to use fMRI technology to record the participants' neural activity and study the unconscious emotions of the brain when the participants listened to happiness, sadness and horror music.

The results show that if women listen to music that distracts their negative emotions, their medial prefrontal cortex activity will increase, while men listen to some music with negative emotions, their medial prefrontal cortex activity will be weakened. The medial prefrontal cortex is active during mood regulation, so these phenomena are related to emotional changes caused by music.

This study suggests that certain types of music are associated with medial prefrontal cortical activation, which means that some types of concerts have long-lasting effects on brain and mental health. The relevant research results were published in the international academic journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.