Personal Music Associated with Significant Pain-Relieving Effects

by | Mar 28, 2018 | 2014, Alternative Therapies, Self-Care

Written by Angeline A. De Leon, Staff Writer. This study of 48 pain-free participants demonstrated that music with significantly higher positive expectancy was most effective at decreasing pain and suggests that the pain-relieving power of personal music may surpass even the effects of enhanced participation.

Perhaps the most ancient of human arts, music has always been considered a universal language. New research from convergent fields of neuroscience and music therapy sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the neural processing of music, supporting the unique capacity of music to activate regional brain networks involved in perceptual processing, emotional regulation, and reward response 1-3. Notably, through its activation of past and present cues, music can also influence the perception of pain and has, for several decades, been effectively used to as a pain modulator for clinical patients 4. It has not been definitively established, however, whether the analgesic effects of music stem from its direct influence over the cognitive and emotional processes associated with pain perception or whether such effects are an indirect consequence of treatment expectancy or placebo response 5. Across various laboratory conditions, studies have supported a strong link between analgesia and expectancy and conditioning, such that contextual factors such as visual cues appear to influence the probability of favorable clinical outcomes 6,7. In an effort to delineate the factors contributing to the analgesic effects of music, Harvard researchers (2014) conducted a study 8 to examine how conditioned-expectancy might enhance or interfere with the analgesia associated with strongly preferred, personal music.

A total of 48 healthy, pain-free participants (average age = 27 years) were enrolled in a two-session randomized, controlled trial. In the first session, 36 participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: a music-conditioning group, a non-musical sound conditioning group, and an unconditioned group. Participants were presented with noxious thermal stimuli on their right arm and asked immediately afterwards to rate pain intensity and unpleasantness using a visual analog scale. During the second session, those in the conditioning groups were given verbal suggestion from the experimenter that the sound they were presented with (either a frequency-filtered sound or their specially selected music) had pain-relieving properties. The particular sound (non-music vs. music) was then repeatedly paired with the presentation of thermal stimuli which was rated by the subjects as being lower in pain intensity during their first session. The control group did not receive conditioning. Finally, all three groups repeated the first session, receiving noxious thermal stimuli on the left arm while listening to music, sound, or silence, in accordance with their assigned treatment condition. Expectancy was assessed using the Expectancy of Relief Scale (ERS) following verbal suggestion, following the conditioning period, and following the testing session. Music was personally chosen by participants.

Analyses revealed that, irrespective of conditioning, a main effect of audio type was evident for pain intensity (F (2,42) = 7.38, p = 0.002, eta2 = 0.26), with music decreasing pain intensity (p = 0.051) and silence increasing it (p = 0.057). Similarly, a main effect of audio type was reported for pain unpleasantness (F (2,42) = 8.44, p = 0.001, eta2 = 0.29), with music decreasing pain unpleasantness (p = 0.013) and no significant difference between sound and silence increasing it (p = 0.174). In the unconditioned group, there was a main effect of audio type for expectancy (F (1,11) = 43.70, p < 0.001, eta2 = 0.80), with participants expecting much greater pain relief from music than sound (ERS mean = 5. 08 vs. 2.89, respectively).

Results demonstrated that music had significantly higher positive expectancy and was most effective at decreasing pain, irrespective of conditioning. Enhanced music expectancy was not found to add to the analgesic effects of music. Therefore, although music and expectancy-based placebo analgesia may share some common pathways, findings suggest that the pain-relieving power of personal music may surpass even the effects of enhanced expectation.

Source: Hsieh C, Kong J, Kirsch I, et al. Well-loved music robustly relieves pain: a randomized, controlled trial. PLoS ONE. 2014; 9(9): e107390. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107390.

© 2014 Hsieh et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Posted March 28, 2018.

Angeline A. De Leon, MA, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010, completing a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a concentration in neuroscience. She received her master’s degree from The Ohio State University in 2013, where she studied clinical neuroscience within an integrative health program. Her specialized area of research involves the complementary use of neuroimaging and neuropsychology-based methodologies to examine how lifestyle factors, such as physical activity and meditation, can influence brain plasticity and enhance overall connectivity.

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