Abstract
Beyond immediate health risks, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a variety of stressors, which may require expensive or unavailable strategies during a pandemic (e.g., therapy, socialising). Here, we asked whether musical engagement is an effective strategy for socio-emotional coping. During the first lockdown period (April–May 2020), we surveyed changes in music listening and making behaviours of over 5000 people, with representative samples from three continents. More than half of respondents reported engaging with music to cope. People experiencing increased negative emotions used music for solitary emotional regulation, whereas people experiencing increased positive emotions used music as a proxy for social interaction. Light gradient-boosted regressor models were used to identify the most important predictors of an individual’s use of music to cope, the foremost of which was, intriguingly, their interest in “coronamusic.” Overall, our results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises, as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.
Highlights
Epidemics have been recurring events throughout human history (Hays, 2005) and evolution (Prohaska et al, 2019)
Regarding the impact of COVID-19 on participants’ lives, in general, the individual samples showed large similarities with what could be expected for the general population in their countries
Drawing on data from demographically representative samples in six countries from three continents, we showed that more than half of the surveyed adult population engaged with music as a strategy for coping with emotional and social stressors in the context of the first COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020
Summary
Epidemics have been recurring events throughout human history (Hays, 2005) and evolution (Prohaska et al, 2019). While reducing public health risk, these measures may create massive economic, societal, and political co-crises which deeply affect socio-emotional wellbeing. Such is the case during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to fear of the virus (Lippold et al, 2020) and elevated stress levels due to physical-distancing measures (Best et al, 2020), many people faced (and continue to face) reduced income or unemployment, the need to combine working from home with childcare duties, uncertainty about the future, and social isolation. Evidence is accumulating for severe negative mental health impacts, such as increased levels of anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, and impaired sleep quality (Dagnino et al, 2020; Dawel et al, 2020; Franceschini et al, 2020; Groarke et al, 2020; Hur et al, 2020; Lenzo et al, 2020; Lippold et al, 2020; Parlapani et al, 2020; Rajkumar, 2020; Rodríguez-Rey et al, 2020; Rossi et al, 2020)
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