Does Music Matter? The Role of Music Listening and Meaning in Life in Reducing Stress of Hong Kong People

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-096-1_12How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Music; Presence of Meaning; Search for Meaning; Stress

Abstract

Music intervention have been proven with positive effect on psychological stress-related outcomes, including different emotions like nervousness, worry and anxiety. However, there is a lack of study to explore the relationship between music listening and meaning in life. It is anticipated that meaning in life is a mediator to the relationship between music listening and stress. Music listening helps individuals to perceive a sense of competency and autonomy, enhancing the feeling of well-being. People with higher level of well-being feel their life meaningful and have higher motivation to seek for meaning in life. The Perceived Stress Scale, the Music Use Questionnaire, and the Meaning in Life Questionnaire were used to measure the variables. A total of 787 Hong Kong people with music experience are targets of the study. Results of the hierarchical regression show that listening music alone was associated with high levels of stress. Moreover, search for meaning plays a partial mediating role between time involved in listening to music alone and stress. These results were different from the hypotheses. More time involved in music listening alone leads to higher stress level while time involved in music listening with others is not related to stress. Search for meaning has been found to be positively associated with stress while presence of meaning is not related with it. Listening music alone has negative effects on increasing stress via its positive relationship with search for meaning.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tsz-Wun Lam
AU  - Raymond Chi-Fai Chui
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/27
TI  - Does Music Matter? The Role of Music Listening and Meaning in Life in Reducing Stress of Hong Kong People
BT  - Proceedings of the Meaning in Life International Conference 2022 - Cultivating, Promoting, and Enhancing Meaning in Life Across Cultures and Life Span (MIL 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 161
EP  - 170
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-096-1_12
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-096-1_12
ID  - Lam2022
ER  -