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Reducing Pain With Focused Music Listening

NCT05267795 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 62

Last updated 2022-03-04

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Pain-reducing effects of music listening are well-established, but the effects are small and their clinical relevance questionable. Recent theoretical advances, however, have proposed that synchronizing to music, such as clapping, tapping or dancing, has evolutionarily important social effects that are associated with activation of the endogenous opioid system (EOS; which supports both analgesia and social bonding). Thus, active sensorimotor synchronization to music could have stronger analgesic effects than simply listening to music. However, to the best of the investigators' knowledge, the hypothesis of an EOS activation by sensorimotor synchronization to music has never been investigated. Accordingly, the investigators set up a test with the premise that if sensorimotor synchronization to music indeed activates the EOS, then it should have larger pain-reducing effects than simply listening to music. Using pressure algometry to the fingernails, specific amounts of pain were delivered to healthy adults either during music listening or silence, while either performing an active tapping task or a passive control task. As the dependent variable, perceived pain was rated on a scale ranging from 1 to 9 (1 = very little, 5 = medium, 9 = very strong). In addition, to pain ratings, participants provided ratings of their emotional state in terms of pleasantness as well as arousal, and then rated their familiarity with the music (also on scales ranging from 1 to 9). Emotion ratings were obtained to explore whether the mechanisms driving pain-reducing effects of sensorimotor synchronization to music include emotion. At the end of the experiment, participants also rated their preference for the music on a scale ranging from 1 to 9 (see Method). Familiarity and preference ratings were obtained to elucidate possible contributions of these factors on pain reduction.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Experimentally-induced pain

Specific pain levels were applied on the participants' fingernails in each of 40 experimental trials using pressure algometry.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • The Research Council of Norway

    collaborator OTHER

  • University of Bergen

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Stefan Koelsch, PhD · University of Bergen, Norway

Study Design

Allocation
NA
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
NONE
Model
SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age
19 Years
Max Age
35 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2019-04-22
Primary Completion
2020-10-30
Completion
2020-10-30

Countries

  • Norway

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05267795 on ClinicalTrials.gov