Musical preferences during and after relaxation and exercise.

Effects of the listening context on responses to music largely have been neglected despite the prevalence of music listening in our everyday lives. This article reports 2 studies in which participants chose music of high or low arousal potential during (Experiment 1) or immediately after (Experiment 2) exercise or relaxation. In Experiment 1, participants preferred appropriate arousal-polarizing music over arousal-moderating music. In Experiment 2, participants preferred arousal-moderating music over arousal-polarizing music, such that their listening times contrasted clearly with those in the first study even though the same music and methods were used. Thus musical preferences interact with the listening situation, and participants' music selections represent an attempt to optimize their responses to that situation. When motivated to maintain a state of polarized arousal, listeners use music to achieve this; when they have no such goal, they use music to moderate arousal.

Konecni (1982, p. 500) criticized research on the psychology of music for failing to account for how "listening to music has become fully imbedded in the stream of daily life." This remains the case despite the pervasive nature of music in modern society, in that even the most mundane, everyday activities such as driving, shopping, watching television, eating a meal, or doing housework often are accompanied by music. The situations in which we listen deliberately to music are greatly outnumbered by those in which we are exposed to music while engaged in other activities; music is a virtually inescapable aspect of our everyday lives. However, very little research has considered the relationship between music and the everyday contexts in which it is experienced. North and Hargreaves (1996a) showed that responses to the music played in a university cafeteria are related to other aspects of participants' responses to that cafeteria. The present study investigates further the apparent link between musical preferen ce and everyday music listening situations by comparing directly two contrasting situations.

As the result of a series of studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, Berlyne (1960, 1971, 1974) established that preference for aesthetic stimuli such as music was determined by three classes of stimulus variables, which he described as collative, ecological, and psychophysical. The collative variables were described as such because Berlyne proposed that when exposed to a musical stimulus, the listener collates several of its informational aspects such as its complexity, familiarity, or redundancy. The ecological properties of a given stimulus are those that concern the extent to which it is meaningful to the listener, for example through learned associations with the stimulus such as the memory of a loved one. The psychophysical properties of a stimulus are its intrinsic physical characteristics, such as intensity or loudness. Berlyne claimed that these three classes of variable are summed together in producing the arousal potential of a given stimulus, or its capability of producing arousal in certain ar eas of the brain. He also claimed that this level of arousal potential is crucial in determining liking for the stimulus in question.

In explaining why this should be so, Berlyne drew on the well-known Wundt (1874) curve. Put simply, this states that pleasure is maximized at moderate levels of arousal and decreases progressively as arousal becomes more extreme. Berlyne claimed that this explains aesthetic preference because artistic stimuli evoke activity in the fibers of the reticular activating system (RAS); these fibers are associated with autonomic nervous system arousal and pass through both the pleasure and displeasure centers of the midbrain. The pleasure centers have a lower threshold, so low levels of stimulus-evoked arousal in the RAS lead to a low amount of pleasure but no displeasure. Stimuli of slightly higher degrees of arousal potential lead to slightly higher levels of activity in the pleasure centers and are consequently liked slightly more, whereas the displeasure centers remain inactivated. When stimuli evoke moderate degrees of arousal, the displeasure centers also become activated. The combined effect of activity in th e pleasure and displeasure centers means that the steadily increasing relationship between liking and stimulus arousal potential begins to level off. Also, the pleasure centers have a lower asymptotic level than do the displeasure centers, so stimuli of still higher degrees of arousal potential do not further increase activity in the pleasure centers, but do continue to produce greater levels of activity in the displeasure centers. This means that liking for stimuli of high arousal potential begins to tail off, and is lower than for stimuli of more moderate levels. Several studies have supported Berlyne's claim that these effects should lead to an inverted-U relationship between liking and stimulus arousal potential (see reviews by Hargreaves, 1986; Finnas, 1989).

However, very few studies have investigated the extent to which Berlyne's theory might be used to explain the relationship between musical preference and the listening situation; in essence, musical research on Berlyne's theory has tended to be context independent, as though music were experienced in a social vacuum. The major exception to this is the research carried out by Konecni (see review by Konecni 1982). He considered how the arousal-evoking qualities of the listening situation might interact with the arousal-evoking qualities of music in determining the melodies participants chose to listen to.

In a study by Konecni, Crozier, and Doob (1976), participants were initially insulted by a confederate of the experimenter posing as a fellow participant. (Earlier pilot research had established that this increased physiological and verbal measures of arousal.) In a second, apparently unrelated part of the experiment, participants were asked over several trials to choose between either complex (arousing) or simple (unarousing) melodies. A control group of noninsulted participants chose each type on an approximately equal number of occasions. In contrast, the insulted (i.e., aroused) participants chose the simpler melodies on approximately 70% of the trials. In a second experiment (Konecni & Sargent-Pollock, 1976), participants were again asked to choose between either complex or simple melodies. Before making these choices participants were exposed to either a very loud (arousing) or a much quieter (unarousing) square wave tone. Participants who had previously been exposed to the loud tone were less likely t o choose the complex melodies than were participants exposed previously to the quieter tone.

Both these studies indicate that participants chose to listen to music that would optimize their mood by moderating their level of arousal. That is, when they were aroused by the listening context they chose to listen to melodies that would decrease and moderate rather than increase and further polarize their levels of arousal; musically and situationally evoked arousal interacted in determining musical preference. The results of these studies correspond with Berlyne's theory by demonstrating that we actively select aesthetic stimuli that will bring about maximal pleasure by producing a moderate level of arousal. Through this arousal moderation process, Konecni's studies provide a theoretical basis for understanding how our musical preferences may interact with the everyday circumstances in which we usually experience music. Indeed, in reviewing these studies Konecni (1982) pointed out quite reasonably that an arousal-based mechanism may explain why we turn down the car radio (and therefore make the music le ss arousing) when we are driving in heavy traffic (a highly arousing situation). It is also worth noting that Berlyne (1971; see pp. 205-206) reviewed a small number of studies showing a similar effect with nonmusical stimuli; for example, he described one study in which participants chose to look at simpler stimuli after the induction of arousal.