A Study On The Influence Of Different Types Of Music On College Students' Sadness

Based on the results of domestic and external study and related theories in this field, taking the form of practical investigation, using the Chinese PANAS developed by Qiu Lin,Zheng Xue and Wang Yanfei, we recruited 200 undergraduate students from Qufu Normal University to complete this study. We explored how sad and happy classical music and pop music influence on college students’ sad emotion, and the difference between genders as well as the difference between music major and other majors. This study contains two sections, study 1 explores sad and happy classical music’s influence on sad emotion, study 2 explores sad and happy pop music’s influence on sad emotion. We asked them to remember one of their saddest things to induce sad emotion, then we let them listen to sad or happy music, or have a rest after elicitation of sad emotion by sad memory. The measures contain direct method— self-report subjective experience and indirect measurement— word recall task. The results are as follows:(1) Direct measurement shows that sad and happy classical and pop music have different influence on sad emotion. Sad classical music, happy classical music, sad pop music and happy pop music are more effective to sad emotion than no music. The influence of both classical music and pop music to sad emotion shows no difference on genders or on majors.(2) Indirect measurement shows that classical music and pop music have no distinct difference on genders, but the interaction effect between gender and music condition is significant. The difference between the quantity of positive adjectives and negative adjectives that male can remember accurately under the four music conditions is more than that of female,while under the no music condition, the result is the opposite.(3) Indirect measurement also shows that the influence of classical music to sad emotion is not different between music major and other majors. While the influence of pop music to sad emotion is different between music major and other majors. The difference between the quantity of positive adjectives and negative adjectives that students in other majors can remember accurately is more than that of students in music major.