Study Of Music Effect On Mental Stress Relief Based On Electroencephalogram Analysis

Stress is the response to the threat and a large number of people are suffering from it.There is clear evidence that it can cause impairment to both mental and physical health.If it is not handled properly,it may lead to severe malignant and chronic diseases.It can be controlled by adopting various stress management techniques like meditation,yoga,balanced diet,exercise,listening to music and several other methods without any side effects.Listening to music often involves strong emotional responses and has the potential to deal with the stress state while performing regular duties so it doesn't need to allocate special time slot from the busy schedule.This study explores the synergistic effect of music(music vs control),music genres(e.g.,classical vs personal preferred music)and timing settings to listen to music(e.g.,listening to music before,during and after the stress stimuli session)on stress relief by recording changes in neural activity using Electroencephalogram(EEG).A set of neurogenic stress stimulus like stroop color-word task,mental arithmetic task and speech were used to induce stress in all fifty-six healthy participants and they were asked to mark the level of stress according to state-trait anxiety inventory(STAI)form Y-1 by Spielberg.The EEG data were recorded using eight channel commercial device(Starstim,NeuroElectric,Barcelona Spain).The EEG signal consists of five frequency bands,namely alpha,beta,theta,delta and gamma bands.A potential EEG biomarker frontal alpha asymmetry(FAA)was used to differentiate the stressful condition with the normal state by calculating the difference in natural log transform of alpha power at the right to the left recording site.Besides that,the mean value of theta,alpha and beta were also calculated.Based on the extracted features and the statistical parameters,it is clear that listening to classical music is better and effective for mental stress relief as compared to self-selected music and rest in silence.The least significant difference(LSD)post hoc test and analysis of variance(ANOVA)were used for analyzing the obtained results.Regarding the timing of listening to music,the two-way ANOVA test indicated that listening to music before,during and after stressful situations has not a big impact on stress relief.The obtained results showed that our proposed experimental design is more coherent and less complicated as compared to the previous work.