Reducing Pain With Focused Music Listening

Pain-reducing effects of music listening are well-established, but the effects are small and their clinical relevance questionable. Recent theoretical advances, however, have proposed that synchronizing to music, such as clapping, tapping or dancing, has evolutionarily important social effects that are associated with activation of the endogenous opioid system (EOS; which supports both analgesia and social bonding). Thus, active sensorimotor synchronization to music could have stronger analgesic effects than simply listening to music. However, to the best of the investigators' knowledge, the hypothesis of an EOS activation by sensorimotor synchronization to music has never been investigated. Accordingly, the investigators set up a test with the premise that if sensorimotor synchronization to music indeed activates the EOS, then it should have larger pain-reducing effects than simply listening to music. Using pressure algometry to the fingernails, specific amounts of pain were delivered to healthy adults either during music listening or silence, while either performing an active tapping task or a passive control task. As the dependent variable, perceived pain was rated on a scale ranging from 1 to 9 (1 = very little, 5 = medium, 9 = very strong). In addition, to pain ratings, participants provided ratings of their emotional state in terms of pleasantness as well as arousal, and then rated their familiarity with the music (also on scales ranging from 1 to 9). Emotion ratings were obtained to explore whether the mechanisms driving pain-reducing effects of sensorimotor synchronization to music include emotion. At the end of the experiment, participants also rated their preference for the music on a scale ranging from 1 to 9 (see Method). Familiarity and preference ratings were obtained to elucidate possible contributions of these factors on pain reduction.