Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°1, 1022-1027
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.143 1022
I
NFLUENCE OF
M
USIC
A
PPRECIATION ON
S
ELF
-C
OGNITION OF
C
OLLEGE
S
TUDENTS
Sisi Liu
*Abstract
The appreciation of music is a process involving various psychological changes. This paper aims to disclose the influence of music appreciation on self-cognition of college students. To this end, a random questionnaire survey was carried out on college students from 6 universities in Nanjing, China, collecting information on their daily time, motivation and requirements of music listening. Referring to the relevant literature, the collected data were analyzed in details to identify how and how much music appreciation influences the self-cognition of college students. The results show that music appreciation is a situational factor that positively affects the thinking mode and behavioral pattern of college students; the emotions expressed by music are generally consistent with the psychological status of college students; the type of favorite music reflects the emotion of college students, which is inseparable from their cognitive ability. This research indicates the possibility to regulate self-cognition of college students with music.
Key words: Music Appreciation, College Students, Self-Cognition, Countermeasures. Received: 18-02-19 | Accepted: 09-07-19
INTRODUCTION
Music is a jewel of human spiritual civilization and an embodiment of emotional art. China's music has a long history of development, leaving many handed down masterpieces (Bhatti, Majid, Anwar et al., 2016). With the development of economy and society, people's demand for music is increasing day by day. From the perspective of audience psychology, different people have different selection psychology, perception psychology, acceptance psychology and group psychology towards music (Saarikallio, Vuoskoski, & Luck, 2014). At present, college students generally have great academic pressure, employment pressure and economic pressure. The increasing stress has a great impact on college students' psychological disorder and cognitive behavior, and college
students’ cognitive behavior and psychological
Tangshan Normal University, Tangshan 063000, China. E-Mail: [email protected]
health are related to the whole family and the hope of the society (Bi, Chan, & Torgler, 2019; Letulė, Ala-Ruona, & Erkkilä, 2018). At present, music has become more and more popular as an effective way to alleviate psychological stress and regulate psychological disorder. Studies have shown that music have obvious effects in helping college students express their emotions and establish a positive outlook on life (Karageorghis, Hutchinson, Jones et al., 2013).
As a high-level stage of college students' mental health development, self-cognition is the self-observation and self-reflection of college students about themselves, including correct self-evaluation, or effectively regulate the behavior of oneself so as to perfect oneself and promote self-development, etc. (Colley, Keller, & Halpern, 2017). Music appreciation is a process of music re-creation, which contains various complicated psychological factors. In this process, the brain's functional structure and working mechanism can be stimulated, and meanwhile the college students are conducting cognitive processing and emotional processing,
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thereby effectively integrating the music content and the cognitive information (D’Souza,
Moradzadeh, & Wiseheart, 2018; Markowitz & Hancock, 2017). The cognitive behavior of college students is formed in the process of information acquiring, stimulating and processing. According to current researches, music has an important positive impact on college students' self-cognition (Patston & Osborne, 2015). This paper adopts investigation and literature review methods to explore the cultivation effect, influence, and countermeasures of music appreciation on
college students’ self-cognition.
THE INFLUENCE OF MUSIC ON COLLEGE STUDENTS' SELF-COGNITION
Investigation on the influence of music on college students' self-cognition
The self-cognition of college students is formed through information stimulation. The information in music has an important influence
on the generation of college students’ self -cognition (Hurme, Puurtinen, & Gruber, 2018; Shih, Chien, & Chiang, 2016). In order to study the influence of music on college students' self-cognition, we used stratified random sampling method to conduct a random questionnaire survey on college students from 6 universities in Nanjing. The subjects of the questionnaire survey were all undergraduate students, a total of 600 questionnaires were distributed and 548 copies were retrieved. The survey was
conducted according to the college students’
daily music-listening time, music-listening motivation and requirement, etc. Figure 1 shows the survey results of college students' self-cognition, it can be seen from the figure that the proportion of male students who can have a full cognition of themselves is higher than that of
female students, and male students’ self -satisfaction situation is better than that of female students, indicating that male students are more likely to achieve self-satisfaction and self-cognition.
It can also be seen from Figure 1 that the proportion of college students who have a good or relatively good self-cognition accounts for more than 85%. From the perspective of self-cognition, college students can have a clear understanding of their psychological and physiological state, and their cognitive ability is good. Figure 2 shows the influence of music
listening time on the self-cognition. Overall, with the increase of daily music listening time, college
students’ self-cognition presents a stable state, but from the perspective of the specific performance of self-cognition, the number of
college student who “understand very well” and “understand” gradually increases with the
increase of the music listening time; in addition, when the daily music listening time exceeds
10min, college students’ performance of self
-cognition is “understand well”, “not understand” and “not understand at all”, and the proportions
gradually decrease with the increase of the music listening time.
Figure 1
.
Survey results of college students'
self-cognition
0 10 20 30 40 50
Not really Comparatively yes
Yes No Completely no
P
er
ce
n
ta
g
e/
%
Self-cognitive psychological status
Male Female
Figure 2
.
The influence of music listening
time on self-cognition
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
＞60 40-60
20-40 5-20
＜5
P
ro
p
o
rt
io
n
/%
Listening to music time/d (min)
Very understand Understand More understand Not understand Very ignorant
Influence of the psychological process of music appreciation on self-cognition
INFLUENCE OF MUSIC APPRECIATION ON SELF-COGNITION OF COLLEGE STUDENTS 1024
roughly divided into three stages: the initial aesthetic expectation, the sound and emotional experience, and the cognition process. There are no clear boundaries between these three stages. Some people know songs by the name and some know songs by melody and lyrics. It is because of the initial aesthetic attitude that there are follow-up emotional experiences and cognition process. Moreover, college students' music appreciation constantly changes with their psychological status. Under the comprehensive action of various psychological factors, the music appreciation activities will continue to transform from the simple initial stage to the advanced stage. College students' ability to perceive music rhythm and melody, and their ability to perceive the sound can both express their emotions toward the music, the emotions expressed by music are generally consistent with the psychological status of college students in the same state.
Figure 3
.
Influence of music appreciation
time on college students' self-will
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Listening to music time/min
＞60 40-60
20-40 5-20
＜5
P
e
rc
e
n
ta
g
e
/%
Improve Maintain the status Escape concealment Self-abandonment
ENLIGHTENMENT OF CORRECT
SELF-COGNITION ON MUSIC
Under normal conditions, college students' self-cognitions are divided into two situations: I-self and me-I-self. The role of music in encouraging, promoting and regulating college students is mainly formed through spiritual self and material self (Hedger, Heald, Nusbaum et al., 2017). Emotion, values and attitude are the three dimensions of college students'
self-cognition. The appreciation process of music is the cultivation and training of students' will, self-value and the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty (Van Hedger & Nusbaum, 2018). Figure 3 shows the influence of music appreciation time on college students' self-will, it can be clearly seen that with the increase of music appreciation time, the self-will of college students is gradually increasing, and the increase of music appreciation time will better adjust the psychological emotions of college students, thereby enhancing their ability to regulate their behaviors, activities and attitudes.
Figure 4
.
Influence of music on college
students' psychological emotion
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Gratitude Reverence Like Complacency Joy Love Calm Relaxed Happy
Male Female
P
ro
p
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rt
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n
/%
Positive effects
Figure 4 shows the influence of music on college students' psychological emotions. The positive emotions induced by music to college students' self-cognition include happy, relaxed, calm, love, joy, complacent, and like. The expression of these positive emotions is related to gender, it is obvious that the joy and relaxed emotions induced by music to the male students are higher than that to the female students,
while female students’ reverence emotion
towards music is higher than the male students. Figure 5 shows the influence of the purpose of listening to music on self-cognition, it can be
clearly seen that college students’ purposes of
listening to music are: relieve stress, relax mood, enrich emotions, cultivate positive attitude and kill free time.
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Figure 5
.
Influence of the purposes of
listening to music on self-cognition
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Very understand Understand More understand Not understand Very ignorant
Kill free time Cultivate a
positive attitude Rich emotions
Relax Relieve stress
P
e
rc
e
n
ta
g
e
/%
The purpose of listening to music
ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF MUSIC APPRECIATION ON COLLEGE STUDENTS' SELF-COGNITION
Influencing factors of college students' self-cognition
From the perspective of cognitive psychology, memory is an important component of cognition process, and memory is an important factor affecting college students' self-cognition. Moreover, college students' emotional activities are another factor affecting their self-cognition, which regulates the college
students’ cognitive information processing
process. Furthermore, personal factor, situational factor and physical factor are also important factors affecting the self-cognition. The music appreciation studied in this paper is a situational factor. Music is positively inspiring
college students’ thinking mode, behavioral pattern and lifestyle with its exchangeability and openness. Through music audition, discussion and other appreciation process, college students integrate their emotions into music appreciation, and motivate themselves through music to change their perception and understanding of themselves. Music is a part of emotional factors; different expression forms or states of music also affect the self-cognition of college students. Figure 6 show the influencing factors of music on college students' self-cognition, the living environment, life role,
emotional influencing factor, physical and mental condition, and personal cognitive ability expressed by the music are all important
influencing factors affecting college students’
cognitive behavior.
Figure 6
.
Influencing factors of music on
college students' self-cognition behavior
16 18 20 22 24
Personal cognitive ability Physical and
mental condition Emotional
influence factor Living
environment
P
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/%
Life role
Influencing process of music appreciation on
college students’ self-cognition
As a special group, college students are unsophisticated, and their cognitive process is a complex psychological process, which is greatly influenced by the outside world (including visual sense, auditory sense, tactile sense and olfactory sense). Throughout the cognitive process, college students will process various sensory information and store the processed information in the central nervous system of the brain, and thereby forming the cognition. In the cognitive process, college students will start from their stored knowledge, their sensory system will acquire all the information about the self and form a self-image, and then convey the information concerning the self via self-description. Through the investigation process, it is found that when college students are in a bad mood or in a very good mood, they will be more inclined to listen to music, and pay more attention to the emotions expressed by the music. Of course, emotions determine the memory effect of college students on music appreciation, which usually manifests as that, when the content of the music is consistent with their emotional status, the memory effect of the college students is better.
Emotion and cognitive ability are inseparable. Figure 7 is the influencing process
INFLUENCE OF MUSIC APPRECIATION ON SELF-COGNITION OF COLLEGE STUDENTS 1026
of emotion on college students' self-cognition. The emotional factor affects the cognitive ability, but both are influenced by college students' physical and mental health factor, and the cognitive ability factor affects the self-cognition. Figure 8 shows the influencing process of music on college students' self-cognition. Through music creation and the expression content, we can understand the personality trait of a person. College students’ choice of music
type is related to their personality and emotional expression, and thus affecting their cognition and self-cognition process.
Figure 7
.
Influence of emotion on college
students' self-cognition
Physical and mental health
Emotional factor
Cognitive competence factors
Self-cognitive ability
Figure 8
.
Influence of music on college
students' self-cognition
Music creation factor and expressive content
Personality traits
Emotion
Cognition
Self-cognitive behavior
Influencing effect of music appreciation on
college students’ self-cognition
Figure 9
.
Introduction to the music
appreciation process’s positive cultivation
aspects on college students
Figure 9 is an introduction to the music
appreciation process’s positive cultivation
aspects on college students, the work appreciation process can cultivate college students to have a positive attitude, improve their creativity and expressiveness, enrich life emotions, enhance their sense of cooperation and collective consciousness with classmates, and help them understand the basic knowledge and skills of music.
The analysis in the previous paragraph shows that both emotions and the physical and mental conditions of college students affect their cognitive behavior, and the cognitive components of the music is consistent with the emotional expressions. In terms of the direct influence of the daily music listening time length, the change in the music listening time will cause changes in the input information and thereby influencing the cognitive behavior of the brain. The energy consumption process of brain regions has a corresponding influence on cognitive behavior, and thereby affecting the self-cognition. Figure 10 shows the countermeasures for college students' correct self-cognition. In the self-cognition behavior process, college students should have an objective and correct understanding of themselves, and effectively control their own behaviors and regulate their moods, so as to establish life goals and self-confidence, as well as understand themselves clearly.
Figure 10
.
Countermeasures for college
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CONCLUSIONS
This paper adopts investigation and literature review methods to explore the cultivation effect, influence, and countermeasures of music
appreciation on college students’ self-cognition. The specific conclusions are as follows:
(1) College students' ability to perceive music rhythm, melody and sound can express their emotions toward the music, the emotions expressed by music are generally consistent with the psychological status of college students in the same state.
(2) Personal factor, situational factor and physical factor are important factors affecting the self-cognition. Different expression forms or states of music also affect the self-cognition of college students. Music appreciation is a situational factor. Music is positively inspiring college students’ thinking mode, behavioral
pattern and lifestyle with its exchangeability and openness.
(3) Emotion and cognitive ability are inseparable. The emotional factor affects the cognitive ability, but both are influenced by college students' physical and mental health factor, and the cognitive ability factor affects the self-cognition. Moreover, college students’
choice of music type is related to their personality and emotional expression, and thus affecting their cognition and self-cognition process.
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