Psychology of Music
July 21, 2026
Uğur Özalp, Sergen Kaya
This exploratory qualitative study examines how 32 professional musicians in Turkey described flow during live performance, and the conditions they perceived as facilitating or constraining it. Using a qualitative descriptive design with a phenomenological orientation and maximum-variation sampling, we conducted semi-structured interviews immediately after live sets to obtain...
Psychology of Music
March 10, 2026
Jan Mauren, Michael Schredl
Music and dreams have been recurring and meaningful themes throughout human history. Empirical research on the topic of music in dreams is limited, particularly when it comes to studies involving participants with professional musical training. In this study, 37 music professionals participated, reporting a total of 151 dreams in a 14-day dream diary and completing questionnaires to assess...
Psychology of Music
May 1, 2025
Elsa Perdomo-Guevara, Nicola Dibben
This article presents the findings of an intervention aimed at promoting positive emotions in music performance, as positive emotions are intrinsically valuable and can have associated benefits. The intervention sought to help participants conceive performance in more meaningful, self-transcendent terms. This study investigated whether the intervention helped performers to change their approach...
Psychology of Music
March 29, 2023
Serena Paese, Hauke Egermann
8 citations
Music performance anxiety (MPA) affects numerous musicians, preventing them from performing to the full extent of their abilities. A variety of tools are used to cope with MPA among which is meditation. Although research conducted to date has made a distinction between the types of meditative techniques and their effects, this aspect is still not thoroughly investigated. The aim of this...
Psychology of Music
November 11, 2019
Abbey L. Dvorak, Eugenia Hernandez-Ruiz
The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of and preference for different auditory stimuli in supporting mindfulness meditation. Undergraduate non-musicians (N = 57) listened to four different auditory stimuli guiding them in a mindfulness meditation: script only (i.e., Script), steady beat (i.e., Beat), beat and harmonic progression (i.e., Harmony), and beat, harmony, and...
Psychology of Music
June 29, 2019
Nina König, Michael Schredl
13 citations
In every culture and nation music has been mentioned as a sort of natural language. While the existence of dreams including music in musicians has been anecdotally reported, music in dreams have been rarely studied empirically. In the present study, 425 participants, mostly psychology students, reported their dreams in a dream diary for 14 days as well as the intensity of their dream emotions...
Psychology of Music
June 27, 2018
Sarah Demmrich
Music and religion are linked in many ways. For example, music can trigger religious experiences, which has been a topic since the beginnings of the study of the psychology of religion. Whether this musical effect is culture-dependent, a pure neuropsychological phenomenon, or a combination of both remains empirically unanswered. This cross-cultural experiment among n = 84 Turks andn = 63...
Psychology of Music
September 27, 2011
Frank M. Diaz
133 citations
This study investigated the effects of a brief mindfulness meditation induction technique on perceived attention, aesthetic response, and flow during music listening as measured by Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) and questionnaire. Participants were students enrolled in music classes or ensembles at a comprehensive university in the southeastern United States ( N = 132), and were...
Psychology of Music
October 10, 2007
Peter Lin, Joanne C Chang, Vance Zemon et al.
94 citations
This study investigated the effects of Chan (Zen) meditation on musical performance anxiety and musical performance quality. Nineteen participants were recruited from music conservatories and randomly assigned to either an eight-week meditation group or a wait-list control group. After the intervention, all participants performed in a public concert. Outcome measures were performance anxiety...