The Effects of a New Music Program on the Management of Emotions for High Risk Young People in Late

Table of Contents                                                   Page 

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………3 

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..4 

Review of Literature…………………………………………………………………5 

Statement of Purpose………………………………………………………………...7 

Hypothesis…………………………………………………………………………...7 

Methods……………………………………………………………………………………...7 

Setting………………………………………………………………………………..7 

Participants…………………………………………………………………………..8 

Instruments…………………………………………………………………………..8 

Procedure…………………………………………………………………………….8 

Table 1……………………………………………………………………………………….10 

Discussion………………..…………………………………………………………………..11 

Limitations…………………………………………………………………………...14 

References……………………………………………………………………………………15 

Abstract 

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a new music therapy program on the management of emotions of adolescents. The sample for this study included a target population that was accessible to the researcher in an afterschool program in Haverstraw NY, the Haverstraw Center. 70 young people took part in this study. Control and treatment groups were of the same population, and both groups were given a pre-and post-test before and after the full run of the music program. The test used was The Children’s Emotion Management Scale (Zeman & Young, 2001). The results of the study demonstrate the effectiveness of the new music program on young people’s management of emotions. In essence, further research is needed to replicate the study and ensure the program’s effectiveness. 

The Effects of a New Music Program on the Management of Emotions for High Risk Young People in Late Childhood/Early Adolescence 

A large study meta-analysis on the benefits of adolescent music involvement and achievement rates was conducted and the results have had influential implications. Researchers already knew that, “Youth music participation is associated with higher matriculation rates, higher rates of acceptance into medical schools, lower rates of current and lifetime alcohol, tobacco, or drug abuse, and lower rates of disruptive classroom behaviors.” (Southgate & Roscigno, 2009, p. 4). However, they also wanted to take other measures.  

The research conveyed the expected increased reading and math scores and all around achievement in childhood up until adolescence where inequalities begin to exist amongst race and socioeconomic status, “findings largely suggest an overall white advantage in music involvement during early childhood and the high school years” (Southgate & Roscigno, 2009, p. 13). Low socioeconomic status was strongly associated with a lack of music involvement. This fit with the results that “the effects of class on parental music involvement were strong and consistent” (Southgate & Roscigno, 2009, p. 18) as well. This research admittedly, like much of the research on music, does not take into account a student’s relationship to musicianship outside formal and classical music styles and education.  

Music therapy is not as associated with any particular genres of music and is generally individualized and open to creative processes ("About Music Therapy & AMTA What is Music Therapy," 2018). Clinically, Music therapy has been supported to show positive mood increases across a wide range of disorders (Shuman, Kennedy, DeWitt, Edelblute, & Wamboldt, 2016) Music has been an effective outlet to people with diagnosed Autism Spectrum for many years. (Silverman, 2008). Music therapy has research that supports its significant effect of reducing depression in adolescents (Rahmani, Bakhtiaru, & Mojtaba, 2016). Music therapy has been supported to increase a more positive and healthier self-esteem in adolescents with behavior and emotional problems (Porter, Mclaughlin, Lynn, Carwell, Braiden, & Holmes, 2017). Also, a higher self-esteem was indicated after the intervention of music therapy in academically stressed adolescents (Sharma & Tanmeet, 2012).  

Already put to practical use have been numerous successful creative expression orientated programs that have suitably worked in alternative schools to enhance grades and participation (Wofl, 2016), (Oikkinen, Kuusi, Peltonen, Ukkla-Vuoti, Karma, Onkamo & Javela, 2016) and (Silverman, 2008). There are various new unique studies, research and organized programs utilizing lyrics centered music therapy in alternative settings, such as; successful violence prevention program from Germany (Wolfl, 2016), a United States program created for as-risk youth apprehensive to counseling  (Sassen, 2012) and a group created at the elementary level for multicultural and immigrant school children (Gonzalez & Hayes, 2009).   

Review of literature 

One successful music therapy program director researcher working at a detention center has said “The growing interest in music instruction and research with incarcerated populations is a positive sign that the profession is living up to its mission of being an education available for all students” (Thompson, 2015, p. 434) A team of music therapist researchers who work in prisons concluded “Music as an action inside and outside prison can be seen as a freedom practice where present harsh realities are juxtaposed with new, more hopeful realities.” (Tuastad, 2013)  

Central to ethical counseling and therapy with many at-risk youth in general, is the concept of cultural competence, “prevention initiatives are more likely to be effective if they take diversity with respect to language, culture, class, and environment into account throughout program development and implementation.”(Goldstein & Noguera, 2006, p. 37).  With lyrics and music, there are plenty uniting factors that cross and meld cultures and this can take place through the rapport of a client and counselor utilizing music therapy techniques (Gonzalez & Hayes, 2009) Even with the guidelines of writing about “anything you can think of”, song writing is an established evidence based practice and it has supportive results that have become part of the successful Acceptance and Commitment Therapy repertoire of evidence based treatments, (Hayes, 2005). 

Important and ethical to therapy and counseling itself, to any population, is the utilization of established evidence based practices although, unfortunately, “estimates indicate that 95% of serious juvenile offenders do not receive an evidence based treatment”(McHeart & Sheidow, 2016, p. 557) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is omnipresent as a successful evidence based treatment in wide ranges of symptoms and disorders (Jongsma, Peterson, & Bruce, 2014) Rational Emotive Education has been accepted as evidence based treatment for minority, black and latino clients (Huey, 2008).    

  What this study will explore is the effectiveness of a newly developed Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy styled music therapy program that focuses on the management of emotions through lyric and song writing in an adolescent minority low socioeconomic status population. Evidence based treatments and other markedly successful programs have led to this development of a new song writing/ music program has been developed to engage adolescents in mentally healthy expression and discovery.  

Statement of Purpose 

The purpose of this experiment is to determine the effect that a new music/song writing program has on the management of emotions in adolescents at an at risk community. 

Hypothesis 

The experiment will support that the new music program will have a significant effect on the management of emotions in at risk adolescents. 

Methods 

Setting 

For this study, participants were chosen from Haverstraw, NY. With a varied range of different cultures within sub-communities, “The ethnic composition of the population of Haverstraw, NY is composed of 7,814 Hispanic residents 64.6%, White residents (20.9%), Black residents (12.1%).  Haverstraw has an increasing high concentration of immigrants on which over 60% speak a non-English language ("DataUSA," 2018). The experiment was conducted at the Haverstraw Center which is, in part, funded by the New York Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse. The facility is community center in which there are free and reduced afterschool, educational and recreational programs for young people with families below the poverty line.  ("About Youth and Family Services," 2018) 

Participants 

The participants of this study were 70 older children to adolescents ages 9 to 14 years old that were regular members of the Haverstraw Center youth programs. They were 70.4% Hispanic, 18% Black ad 11.6% White, however males and females were of equal representation. Staff of the center used computer generated simple random sampling to divide the treatment and control groups representing a stratified sample of Haverstraw’s ethnic demographics.  

Instruments 

To measure the effects of the young people’s management of emotions, both groups were given The Children’s Emotion Management Scale (Zeman & Young, 2001). This served as both a pre-test and a post-test measures of their managements of emotion. The Children’s Emotional Management Scales 27 items numerically self- describe children’s emotional management using a Likert scale of 1 (hardly ever), 2 (sometimes), or 3 (often), children answer to item that fits three subscales: (a) Inhibition, suppression of emotional expression (example: ‘I get sad inside but I don’t show it’); (b) Dysregulated Expression, children’s culturally inappropriate emotional expression (example: ‘I say mean things to others when I am mad’);and (c) Emotion Regulation Coping, children’s adaptive methods of emotion management (example: ‘When I am feeling sad, I do something totally different until I calm down’). (Afshari, Neshat-Doost, Maracy, Ahmady, & Amiri, 2014) 

Procedure 

Care giver consent forms were received and signed, knowing their children would be participating in a non-invasive research experiment however unknown to them whether their child was in the control or treatment/experimental group or anything about the experiment. CEMS Pre-tests were given one week before the first installment of treatment/music program. CEMS post-test data were taken one week after the final and twelfth week of completed program. Both CEMS tests were administers by testers unknown to the researcher or the children/participants,  

The program itself is a 12 week program which ran Friday evening’s 5p.m. to 7 p.m. directly following a non-mandatory homework help program. The daily program consists self-expression exercises and technique lessons: instrument playing, lyric writing and collaboration; The music program implementation was run by the program creator and researcher with the help and supervision of the Haverstraw Center’s Assistant Director and one student worker. The CEMS post-test measures were taken one week after the last program date. A separate test-giver administered the CEMS post-test than the CEMS pre-test. 

Results 

Following data collection being finalized, a t-test was utilized to evaluate the effects of the new music program on young people’s management of emotions by measuring CEMS scores of the two groups of young people. The treatment group completed the new music/song writing program and the control did not and instead did other productive afterschool programs. The scores are presented in Table 1. 

The results of the study supported the hypothesis because significant differences were found between the control and treatment groups on the variable of management of emotions. The young people who completed the new music program scored significantly higher on the CEMS post-test those did not. Those young people in the control group who not participate in the music program did not show significant change in their management of emotion  

Table 1 

The effects of music program on emotional management  

                  CEMS  Pre-test  CEMS  Post-test   

                N=70                      p>05.   *p<.05.                                 

n=35  **40.6	n=35  **60.
*40.4	*40.3

Discussions and implications 

The results of this study, not only supports the hypothesis but also gives a positive direction to the hypothesis. Knowing that a change occurs in the management of emotions when otherwise it would not have occurred is critical when considering how it may change the trajectory of a young person’s life to live mentally healthier, which may in turn change the lives of others for the better as well. Successful collaborating with an ethnically diverse community seems and boosting cohesion amongst varying members, has had proactive and preventative style of counseling in its research (Sassen, 2012) (Rahmani, Bakhtiaru, & Mojtaba, 2016) ( Wofl, 2016), (Oikkinen et al., 2016) and (Silverman, 2008). Learning a skill like playing an instrument or learning to write is the gaining of a tool that will become personalized, if applicable to that person. Music is collaborative by its very nature. Due to variations in intensities of the enthusiasm of the young people that were participants in the treatment group, a randomized sample was used to include young people with variable affinities towards music in general and even specific instruments and lyric output styles. This was done to reduce the confounding variable that some of the young people had been exposed to rock instruments in the past. 

Genetic research supports that major human differences between human talents and disorders can be partially viewed as innate. Facts of science have declared creativity is a genetic endowment given by the nature of a given individual (Granot, Uzefovsky, Bogopolsky, & Ebstein, 2013) and (Matyja, 2015). These highly genetically influenced attributes not only cluster in certain communities, but they also both link and separate people, distinguishing themselves in society (Oikkinen et al., 2016). These more rare genetic conditions are not of the collective mainstream experience and therefore, young people in the education system may not be adequately offered opportunities to discover their organic talents. 

There are many music therapy programs that have amalgamated different counseling orientations, with various age, culture and psychologically different populations, however; to the knowledge of the experimenter no programs thus far have been generated by genetic research. The experimenter intentionally sought to use evidence based practices, use live musical instruments, and developed a program that will be subjected to further ongoing experimentation and quantitative analysis to evolve itself. “Although sometimes questioned, the survival value of art, music, games, and other activities…a culture must positively reinforce the behavior of those who support it and must avoid creating negative reinforces from which its members will escape through defection” (Skinner, 1976, p. xiii)   

Cutting edge genetic research has been accruing perpetually over the past few years. Specific genes, or single-nucleotide-polymorphisms (SNPs), have been found to contribute many skills as well as disorders. Sometimes we see both a skill and a diagnosable mental disorder etiologically linked with specific one specific SNP, such as song writing and deviance (Granot, Uzefovsky, Bogopolsky, & Ebstein, 2013). 

A recent 2016 large scale study on creativity and music synthesized current ideas about the musical areas of the brain and genes associated. Observing how much genes matched with creativity and musical aptitude analysis, researchers stated, “Overall, musical traits including also music-related creativity seem to be at least partially inherited.” (Oikkinen, Kuusi, Peltonen & Ukkola-Vuoti, 2016, p. 16) Furthermore, “Several genetic studies have linked dopamine with divergent thinking, which is a process of generating creative solutions and includes components like fluency, originality and flexibility (Oikkinen et al., 2016, p. 1-2). Dopamine regulation seems to play a role in musical abilities as well as in some mental illness. This comes to the forefront of discussion when seeking alternatives to aggressive behavior.  

 Elsewhere certain polymorphisms have also been found to incur propensities for individuals to engage in increased violence, substance abuse, gambling and crime in general (Perbal, 2013). Arginine Vasopressin, a hormone directly influenced by genes, seems to also play a role in music and has also been associated with aggressive and mature behavior, (Granot, Uzefovsky, Bogopolsky, & Ebstein, 2013). It is becoming increasingly clear that genetic differences in creativity have both pros and cons for individuals, though for some may unfortunately mostly experience the negative aspects.  

Genes are increasingly being linked to disorders. Oppositional Defiant Disorder, as well as multiple ADHD variations have been linked to genes (Wang, Liu, Cong, & Lv, 2016). Various genes related to circadian rhythm and sleep cycle differences have been found prevalent in certain cultures (Hawkins, Meyers, Bleecker, & Pack, 2008). Many people are multiethnic and therefore may contain the convergence of various gene combinations in clusters. Similarly, various specific genetic adaptations, polymorphisms, have be found to exist in the loci of chromosomes in the DNA of musicians and other creative individuals (Oikkinen et al., 2016).  

One researcher has called creativity “positive deviance” (Kusha, 2006). On an optimistic perspective, musicians often find the performing of their art to be a means of cathartic stress release. This can be both personally rewarding and collaboratively enjoyed when accompanied with others. Their music can become a source of praise by listeners and sometimes they even get monetarily rewarded. On the scientific level, the stress release and enjoyment musicians experience is due to the increased neurological functioning of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin as well as the greater activities of hormones like vasopressin and cortisol (Granot, Uzefovsky, Bogopolsky, & Ebstein, 2013). This is done unknowingly under the musician’s control. 

Recent studies propose that this connection derives from activity in the mirror neuron system. Mirror neurons are often called the neurons of empathy. “There is empirical evidence indicating that people with high dispositional empathy are also more susceptible to emotional contagion from music." (Vuoskoski, 2015, p.99)  Also it has been found that “people with high dispositional empathy have been found to exhibit stronger somatomotor responses to others’ pain, and stronger activation of the auditory mirror system in response to action sounds” (Vuoskoski, 2015, p.99) These findings lend insight to the idea that an emotive and cognitively oriented music programs can do a lot of good for young people; not only to help them creatively express themselves but also to help with them managing their emotions. 

Limitations 

More adequate scaling absolutely would be needed to measure stage specific traits as young people begin to enter adolescents at different ages. The CEMS test covered the age range of a majority of the young people but there were some young people that took the test that were a year, younger or older that the population the CEMS was created for. If the current supported genetic research were applied it would easier to see who would benefit greatly from this music program. This study needs repetition and replication in different settings and other psychological measures need to be accessed to see what is the most effective component of the new music program and how to improve it. 

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