Does religious music influence wellbeing?

 

Religious Music 2023 by
Geoffrey Sutton and Bing

Does religious music influence wellbeing?

Music, Religious Identity, and Wellbeing

 

Renate Ysseldyk and others examined responses of Christians and Atheists to religious music. Previous studies found a positive link between listening to music and both memory and wellbeing. But the authors wondered if religious identity would make a difference.

Psychologists find that our identities are bound up with our sense of our social groups. If the groups we identify with are threatened, then many of us experience negative effects such as a negative mood and even impaired memory needed for learning.

The study

There were 188 women and 72 men between the ages of 16 and 56 in this study. Their religious identity was used to form two religious groups: Christian and Atheist. The researchers presented them with one of four types of music, which created four music groups:

Christian hymn

Buddhist chant

Classical

No music control group

Wellbeing was measured using three measures of self-esteem and two measures of mood (positive and negative affect). They also measured memory for recall of the words in the music.

Wellbeing results

For self-esteem, the performance type revealed different effects. Atheists self-esteem was higher when listening to Buddhist chants or no music and was lower when listening to hymns. But for Christians, differences in performance self-esteem did not vary significantly. When the mood results were analyzed, Christians reported more hostility than atheists in response to Buddhist chants. Atheists responded with higher hostility scores when listening to a Christian hymn.

 

Memory results—according to the authors:

In sum, then, listening to Buddhist chants appeared to impair the memory performance of Christians relative to Atheists, while somewhat bolstering Atheists’ memory performance when compared to the effects of listening to other types of music.

Their conclusion:

The present study provides preliminary evidence that music which could be perceived as identity-threatening — namely, music that is associated with a religious group to which one does not belong — can elicit negative emotions (e.g., hostility), and diminish performance self-esteem and memory performance.

Reference

Ysseldyk, R., Karamally, T., Kelly, A., Morton, T. A., & Haslam, S. A. (2021). They’re (not) playing our song: (ir)religious identity moderates the effects of listening to religious music on memory, self‐esteem, and mood. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 51(8), 838–849. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12804

 

Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD is Emeritus Professor of Psychology. He retired from a clinical practice and was credentialed in clinical neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. His website is  www.suttong.com

 

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