Engagement in Music-Related Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic as a Mirror of Individual Differences in Musical Reward and Coping Strategies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its impact (e.g., confinement orders) have affected people's lives in profound ways that would have been unimagable only months before the pandemic began. Media reports from the height of the pandemic's initial international surge frequently highlighted that many people were engaging in music-related activities (from singing and dancing to playing music from balconies and attending virtual concerts) to help them cope with the strain of the pandemic. Our first goal in this study was to investigate changes in music-related habits due to the pandemic. We also investigated whether engagement in distinct music-related activities (singing, listening, dancing, etc.) was associated with individual differences in musical reward, music perception, musical training, or emotional regulation strategies. To do so, we collected detailed (~1 h-long) surveys during the initial peak of shelter-in-place order implementation (May-June 2020) from over a thousand individuals across different Countries in which the pandemic was especially devastating at that time: the USA, Spain, and Italy. Our findings indicate that, on average, people spent more time in music-related activities while under confinement than they had before the pandemic. Notably, this change in behavior was dependent on individual differences in music reward sensitivity, and in emotional regulation strategies. Finally, the type of musical activity with which individuals engaged was further associated with the degree to which they used music as a way to regulate stress, to address the lack of social interaction (especially the individuals more concerned about the risk of contracting the virus), or to cheer themselves up (especially those who were more worried about the pandemic consequences). Identifying which music-related activities have been particularly sought for by the population as a means for coping with such heightened uncertainty and stress, and understanding the individual differences that underlie said propensities are crucial to implementing personalized music-based interventions that aim to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".