The acute effect of arousing and relaxing music on athletes’ mood: A study to identify the difference between contact and non-contact sports

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine the acute effect of arousing and relaxing music on mood variables among contact and non-contact sports participants. This experimental study was conducted recruiting 52 male athletes from contact sports (n=26) and non-contact sports (n=26) aged range from 23 to 26 years with more than five years of experience in their sports. Participants listen to either arousing or relaxing music for 15 minutes before they complete the Brunel Mood Scale which measured their mood. Each athlete listened to both music types randomly on two consecutive dates. Data were not normally distributed (P < 0.05). Hence, non-parametric tests were used to analyse the data. To analyse the effect of arousing and relaxing music on all participants, Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used, and results showed that vigour is significantly high after listening to arousing music, and tension and depression mood variables were significantly high with relaxing music (p < 0.00). To find the effect of both music types on contact and non-contact sport athletes, the Mann-Whitney U test was used, and results revealed that there is a significant difference between contact and non-contact sport athletes on fatigue (p = 0.01) and confusion (p = 0.02) mood variables after listening to the arousing music. The findings indicate that there is an acute effect of music type on some mood variables among the athletes. Hence, listening to music can rapidly change athletes’ mood and music can be used to increase arousal or relax athletes during competitions. More research is needed to confirm the outcome of this study.