Regulating effect of musical education on the positive emotions considering the effect of emotional contagion

Abstract

This paper aims to verify whether music education could induce positive emotions, and explore the emotional regulation of different types of music and different breathing methods. For this purpose, a 2x2 factorial experiment was designed to test the emotional impacts of two types of music (soundscape music and non-soundscape music), and two breathing methods (abdominal breathing and thoracic breathing). The test subjects were evaluated against the revised positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS-R). The results show that, music can induce positive emotions and reduce negative emotions; the most significant increase in positive emotions was observed under the soundscape music/abdominal breathing condition, while the most insignificant increase was observed under the non-soundscape music/thoracic breathing condition; the most significant decrease in negative emotions was observed under the soundscape music/thoracic breathing condition, while the most insignificant decrease was observed under the non-soundscape music/thoracic breathing condition. The research provides more empirical evidences to the emotional impacts of music education.