Exposure To Pro-social Music Reduce Aggressive Affect:Impact Of Lyrics And Accompaniment

With the continuous development of Internet technology, the music has penetrated into the people’s daily life as a way of entertainment. The music plays a psychological influence on people, which attracts the attention of more and more psychologists. It starts with the aggressive influence on people of violent music in the area of music research to people’s behavior. Based on the General Aggressive Model (GAM), researchers found that comparing to the neutral music, violent music can enhance the subjects’ aggressive behavior (Warburton, Gilmour, & Laczkowski,2008). However, with the development of General Learning Model (GLM), the object of the study have extended to pro-social music. Greitemeyer (2009) shows that social media can facilitate the subjects’ pro-social variable just like pro-social thinking, empathy and can even increase the likelihood of participants contributions. The deepening of the research allows researchers to refined the composition of music, from the lyrics, the accompaniment to find out the different influence on human behavior respectively. Lennings & Warburton (2011) studied the influence of violent lyrics on people’s aggressive behavior, the results show that violent lyrics play an important role in strengthening the aggressive behavior of human. Comparing to the violent music, the studies about the influence of pro-social songs and lyrics on aggression variables is relatively loose. Based on the related results that the aggressive lyrics had an effect on aggression, we further discusses the impacts of pro-social songs, lyrics and accompaniment to human’s aggressive feelings.Taking college students as the research object, we designed three experiments, which set up the offensive situation to provoke subjects’aggression. Then cultivate the subjects with pro-social or neutral songs, pro-social or neutral accompaniment, pro-social or neutral lyrics. Finally, participants fill out the tests measuring aggressive emotion questionnaire and required the results. Based on General Learning Model, we answer the following questions from the song, accompaniment and lyrics:(1) Whether there is significant effects of the pro-social songs to the aggressive affect? (2) Whether there is significant differences between the pro-social and neutral accompaniment? (3) Whether there is significant differences between the pro-social and neutral lyrics?The results showed that:Firstly, there is significant difference between pro-social/neutral song conditions, the participants have a less aggressive feelings under pro-social songs condition;Secondly, there is no significant difference between pro-social/neutral accompaniment conditions;Thirdly, there is significant difference between pro-social/neutral lyrics conditions, the participants have a less aggressive feelings under pro-social lyrics condition.