Social and applied psychological explorations of music, health and well-being
Book Chapter ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
The successes of modern Western healthcare have included extended life expectancy and reduced illness and disease. Along with these gains, we increasingly search for interventions to facilitate people’s quality of life in terms of both individual and group senses of wellness, satisfaction and contentment (www.mindhealthconnect.org.au/wellbeing). In other words, well-being is a strongly desired outcome for modern everyday life. As the introduction to this volume indicates, engagement in music (via listening and playing) has been found to have a positive role to play in everyday well-being. Music listening accompanies us through our every-day activities, owing to the ever-sophisticated technologies at our finger-tips. As this chapter will reveal, in Western contexts, we often regulate our moods listening to music with different types of music satisfying different needs. Additionally, making music exerts considerable demands on the human central nervous system as it interactively engages memory and motor skills. Even when well embedded in memory and automated—for example in someone who has a piece well learned—the activity of performing music engages significant cognitive load, requiring ongoing active decision-making and fine mental and motor adjustments. Evidence also points towards these very demands having positive effects on brain plasticity, with musicians possessing more pronounced mental flexibility among those engaged in skilled activities (Altenmüller and Gruhn 2002; Altenmüller et al. 1997; Schellenberg 2004).
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Publication Name
Music, Health and Wellbeing: exploring music for health and social justice
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ISBN/ISSN
978-1-349-95284-7
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Pages Count
30
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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
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Publisher Location
London, UK
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DOI
10.1057/978-1-349-95284-7_3