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Is Background Music A Distraction?

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Music is a form of media that is utilized in everyday life. There is a huge variety of genres of music. Each genre of music can be used to influence a certain mood. In many areas a person can walk into, there is a high possibility that music will be playing. Due to music’s relevance to everyday life, there has been a multitude of research based on whether music is a distraction to people. A distraction in most research would be shown as lower results in tests for groups who listened to background music compared to those who did not listen to background music while being tested. Background music is music that participants listen to while he or she is given a task to complete. The purpose of this paper is to see what the benefits and drawbacks …show more content…
Research such as Hilde’s study utilized questionnaires to exhibit the different personality type each person has. Although in Hilde’s study, extraversion and introversion were a part of the study; Dobbs and his partners (2010) main thing they were looking for was the difference music had between introverts and extraverts. In this experiment, the participants found were 118 females that were aged from 11 to 18. To group each person by personality, each female was given the EPI test (Eyesnck & Eyesnck, 1968) to be identified as either introverted or extraverted. Again, like Hilde’s experiment, Dobbs randomly assigned each participant to one of three groups, but unlike Hilde’s design, Dobbs used a within-subject research design. Dobbs decided that each group was to undergo each level of the independent variable, which means that each group would do a task with music playing, no music playing, or random noise playing in the background (Dobbs, et al., 2010). The results of Dobbs’ experiment exhibited that in all types of personalities; music was detrimental upon the tasks given to the participants (Dobbs, et. al., 2010). Furthermore, Dobbs also explained that music that the participant is more familiar to will have a different reaction than noise that he or she is …show more content…
In this study, the researchers examined how music affects arousal and mood towards older people while he or she is doing a task. One of their goals was to compare and contrast what types of music has a certain effect on people. This study examined both episodic and semantic memory. Like other research studies, this study used a within-groups research design; each participant went listened to each level of the independent variable. The levels of the independent variables were: no music, white noise, Mozart, and Mahler. No music and white noise were the control variables while the songs produced by Mozart and Mahler were the experimental variables. Mozart’s music was utilized to induce positive emotions while in contrast Mahler’s music bring about negative emotions (Bottiroli et al., 2014). The researchers conducting this experiment observed that when testing episodic and semantic memory, classical music, whether it was Mahler or Mozart, had a statistically significant result compared to the control groups; the stronger the emotions the person feels leads to the stronger possibility of memory retrieval. These results seemed to explained that memory and music is correlated by the intensity of the emotions that the music constitutes the person to feel (Bottiroli et al.,

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