A study conducted by doctors in the Pain Research Center at the University of Utah, has expanded the research being done to discover the effects music listening and engagement has on pain perception and pain relief in people. The experiment contained two independent variables: the level of pain being administered, and the difficulty of the task being asked of the subject. The researchers took a baseline of each subject’s pain tolerance, then created three levels of pain to be used in the experiment which were 20%, 50%, and 80% of this measurement. Tasks included finding deviant tones within songs which were familiar to the client.
What the researchers found was that there were two components of the subjects’ personality which determine how well music would help with pain relief. The first was their ability to become absorbed in the music and the task. Because pain messages cannot be fully received while attention is elsewhere, pain relief is dependent on how absorbed the subject is in it. Researchers thought that having high levels of anxiety would prevent participants from being able to focus on the task given, however, they found it to have the opposite effect.
It was concluded that music can, in fact, be stress relieving depending on the subject’s level of engagement in it, which can be increased by how much anxiety is felt at a given time.
I was surprised by how quickly I was able to summarize this study. I think that because I had already familiarized myself with the study by reading through and highlighting the important parts of it, I already knew what details I could leave out such as some of the process and small details such as what specific songs were used during the experiment. Having the original pop culture article to look at made it easier to know how to structure my summary and what kind of concise language I should be using. The biggest help I think was having written the scholarly article critique because I had already gone through and decided what information to leave out and figured out how to best summarize the experiment which gave me a lot of ideas on how to write this article. It still was a bit difficult however, because I knew so much more about the experiment than what I was writing so I felt like I wasn’t giving the reader a big enough picture. Condensing a 20+ page study into just 253 words or less isn’t easy, and without the time I had spend with it prior it would have been very difficult. I understand now how journalism can be different depending on how much space you have to be detailed and share more about the subject. I think that in comparison to my scholarly article critique, this summary doesn’t give nearly as much information or answer as many questions, and I know now that that’s just because the length difference, making the information prioritized differently.
Pisacane Perspectives 