Personality and Music: An Effect on Arithmatic Performance

Abstract

Music has been found to increase the productivity as well performance in industrial sectors. The studies in relation to academics are however, very sparse yet. In day to day life music is common and often unavoidable. The students are fond of playing music while studying. But the effects cannot be the same for everyone. Keeping such factors in mind, it was felt highly relevant to study the effect of music on arithmatic task amongst different personality types, i.e., extroverts and introverts. The present study was a 3x2 factorial (repeated measure) design to investigate the effect of music on arithmetic performance amongst extroverts and introverts having an age range of 14-16 years. The sample of 27 students (18 extroverts and 9 introverts) was screened out from a school of Nangloi (Delhi) after administering the introversion and extroversion inventory by Aziz and Agnihotry. After this, 3 different sets of arithmetic ability tasks were standardized and administered on these subjects in three different musical conditions (silence, instrumental and vocal). Errors and time taken were recorded. The results were analyzed by 2-way ANOVA followed by DRT indicated that music enhanced the performance in terms of speed much more than in terms of errors. Regarding speed, the type of music did not affect the extroverts and introverts differently, but regarding the errors, introverts were the gainer i.e. they committed lesser errors. It was also found that any type of music was better than silence condition. So music can be used as a facilitating agent in different domains of life.