Music and Anxiety: A Study

This research was conducted with the goal of determining if classical music has a stress relieving effect on subjects taking easy and difficult tasks. State Trait Anxiety Inventories, Galvanic Skin Response (sweat) data and plethysmograph (blood pressure) data were all recorded to monitor different kinds of possible responses to classical music. The results showed that the conditions (hard tangram, easy tangram, hard word, easy word) were sufficient in changing subjects anxiety levels, but only one music effect was found, a trend with the plethysmograph data. This showed that while there might be a music effect it is slight, and more research and different types of measurements are required to explore this question further