Abstract
The hypothesis was tested that musical activities may contribute to the prevention of alexithymia. We tested whether musical creative achievement and musical practice are associated with lower alexithymia. 8000 Swedish twins aged 27–54 were studied. Alexithymia was assessed using the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20. Musical achievement was rated on a 7-graded scale. Participants estimated number of hours of music practice during different ages throughout life. A total life estimation of number of accumulated hours was made. They were also asked about ensemble playing. In addition, twin modelling was used to explore the genetic architecture of the relation between musical practice and alexithymia. Alexithymia was negatively associated with (i) musical creative achievement, (ii) having played a musical instrument as compared to never having played, and – for the subsample of participants that had played an instrument – (iii) total hours of musical training (r = -0.12 in men and -0.10 in women). Ensemble playing added significant variance. Twin modelling showed that alexithymia had a moderate heritability of 36% and that the association with musical practice could be explained by shared genetic influences. Associations between musical training and alexithymia remained significant when controlling for education, depression, and intelligence. Musical achievement and musical practice are associated with lower levels of alexithymia in both men and women. Musical engagement thus appears to be associated with higher emotional competence, although effect sizes are small. The association between musical training and alexithymia appears to be entirely genetically mediated, suggesting genetic pleiotropy.
Highlights
It has been shown repeatedly that musical activity in children and adults is positively associated with performance in a broad range of non-musical cognitive tasks (Schellenberg, 2004, 2006; Schellenberg and Weiss, 2013)
Age left the correlations between number of music practice hours and alexithymia unchanged (r = −0.12 for men and r = −0.09 for women). Since these results indicated that adjustment for education, depressive symptoms, and Wiener Matrizen-Test (WMT) score was of minor importance, the genetic analyses were performed without these adjustments
Since the twin correlations were slightly different for men and women, a sex-limitation model was fitted allowing the ACE-estimates to differ between the sexes
Summary
It has been shown repeatedly that musical activity in children and adults is positively associated with performance in a broad range of non-musical cognitive tasks (Schellenberg, 2004, 2006; Schellenberg and Weiss, 2013). Performance, and composing involve affective processing (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001), and a important question relates to the potential of associations between musical activity and emotional skills (Wrangsjö and Körlin, 1995; Dissanayake, 2000; Baumgartner et al, 2006; Gabrielsson, 2011). Emotional competence can be operationalised in different ways, but one key concept in the psychosomatic literature relating emotional ability to disease development is alexithymia, – i.e., a deficiency in the ability to process emotions. Alexithymia has been shown to be negatively related to other measures of emotional competence (Baughman et al, 2013)
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