Study Of Music Effect On Stress Relief Based On Heart Rate Variability

In the last few decades,mobile phone based health care systems became ubiquitous,giving birth to an unprecedented interest for psychologists and neuroscientists to develop novel therapies for stress relief.The latter poses severe health threats and might lead to death if not dealt with in proper time.Music has the power to elicit physiological responses in human body.Researchers stated that different music genres lead to different states of mind.Classic music and self-chosen musical pieces are known to be beneficial for stress relief.However,no clear conclusion related to these musical genres is established.Moreover,listening to music right after the stressful situation is proved to be efficient.However,the literature did not study the effect of listening time to music before,during or after the stress stimulus on the recovery.Therefore,this thesis investigates the impact of both musical genres(i.e.classic vs self-selected relaxing music)and the timing of listening to music(i.e.before vs.during vs.after the stress stimulus)based on heart rate variability(HRV)and subjective stress ratings.Experiments were designed and data were collected to study the above problems.Analysis of variance was performed on the assessed parameters.HRV time and frequency domain metrics showed that listening to both classic and self-selected relaxing music impacted in better relaxation if compared to resting in silence.Higher relaxation level was observed in classic music group with significant differences.Moreover,listening to music before,during and after the stress stimuli did show a similar impact on the relaxation.Considering the subjective stress ratings,no significant differences were observed.These results do not only show that classic music performs better than self-selected or silence no matter what time of listening to music is,but also points out an undeniable fact,that is physiological parameters give richer information if compared to pure subjective ratings.