When considering the topic of music and its effect on a person's emotions, the focus often shifts to all the positive influences music has had on a person. Maybe music is what helped them get over their last breakup, or they'd feel completely lost without their jam session in the car on the way home from work. Perhaps the conversation will turn to the well-researched and fascinating benefits of music therapy on children with developmental disabilities. Sometimes the conversation will veer into how this hypothetical person can't stand listening to a certain genre of music, a particular song, an annoying jingle on TV, or how he thinks that, for example, Gangster Rap is destroying our youth. Opinions are opinions, but these ideas are rarely given more than a second thought about how and why they arise. The truth about music's influences is not easy to guess. Although many researchers prefer to focus on the beneficial and positive qualities of music, it is clear that music has an unlikely dark side that has the ability to manipulate emotions in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Perhaps the most controversial of these ideas concerns the seemingly negative influences of rap, heavy metal, punk, and related styles of supposedly "deviant" music. Many studies have been conducted to find a link between deviant music and aggressive behavior, but more recent studies from the last two decades seem to indicate that more in-depth research needs to be conducted on the topic. A popular and well-accepted method for measuring aggression in test subjects since 1999 has been a test dubbed the Hot Sauce Paradigm (or HSP) in which experimenters provide the subject with a glass of water (generally after stimuli or control that induce aggression have already been absorbed). been administered), warn the subject that the glass will be given to drink by another subject - who happens to hate spicy food - and that the subject can add as much hot sauce as he wants after being left alone in a room for privacy. The problem is that the mixture is instead weighed to determine how much was added and no one ends up drinking it. According to Lieberman, Solomon, Greenberg, and McGregor (1999) who developed this method, “Our goal was to provide an opportunity for individuals to engage in behavior that could cause direct and unambiguous physical harm to another individual, while minimizing the ethical concerns arising from the actual physical discomfort endured by participants during the procedure. "Using the HSP method, Mast and McAndrew (2011) determined that, when testing a group of male college students divided into a group exposed to heavy metal music with violent lyrics, a group exposed to nonviolent heavy metal music lyrics and a control group that listened to no music at all, "The group exposed to the violent lyrics added significantly more hot sauce to the water than the other two groups..." indicating that the lyrics themselves were the catalyst for the aggressive behavior rather than the musical genre itself (Violent Lyrics in Heavy Metal, 2011) Triplett (2016) attempted to replicate this same study using other tests for aggression instead of the HSP method and with a larger and more varied group of participants which he divided equally. between the three groups mentioned in the previous experiment plus a group exposed to calm music with violent lyrics and a group exposed to calm music with nonviolent lyrics The results wereunexpected. “…the present study failed to find either a main effect of lyrical content or an interaction between lyrical content and background music on individuals' levels of aggressive behavior…. These findings appear to contradict the conceptual models and empirical findings of previous research” (p. 28). While the hunt for the link between music and aggression remained inconclusive, Triplett's study confirmed, "the findings supported the belief that music can influence an individual's affective state... Affective state plays a substantial role in a variety of critical cognitive and behavioral processes, including judgment, cognitive processing, and perception” (p. 30). This indicates that although deviant music may have outward connotations towards negative topics, its influence is not sufficient to activate motivational affective intensity, that is, the willingness to act on emotional arousal. So, if specific genres are not to blame, how, then, can music negatively affect people? The human tendency to seek emotional regulation through music is a good place to start. Evidence has shown that, at times, a person's brain can fixate on or ruminate on negative music that matches their level of emotional discordance. According to Carlson et al. (2015), “Rumination…involves repetitive cognitive focus on the negative aspect of a situation, without attempts to alter perception of the situation, and has been associated with an increased risk of depression and anxiety” (p. 2 ). When a person is going through a difficult time, they have the choice to choose to ruminate or distract themselves through music. The research goes on to conclude that using music as a means to deflect from negative thoughts activates parts of the brain associated with effective emotional regulation and is therefore a more useful coping strategy, while rumination may cause long-term harm (e.g. 10). In another example of the negative implications of music on a person's health, Thorley (2011) introduces the idea of ​​the “passive listener”. The passive listener is a person who has no control over the music and/or background noise around him, especially when it comes to living together in a public space. In this case, when a person owns equipment that emits or causes a noise imposed on helpless bystanders, such as an iPod or portable gaming device, if the noise is not adequately contained, the act is defined as violence. In response to the invasion of their personal space by this unwanted noise, the passive listener can, potentially, even succumb to violence. “This is because physiological and psychological changes in the passive listener's body can produce feelings of aggression that could lead to expressions of violence” (p. 81). Ironically, these invasive noises can include those that are supposed to be helpful, such as white noise machines and specifically tailored workplace music. Contributing to this stressful violation of the passive listener's individual peace is his or her own lack of power over the situation, the potential for poor sound quality through the speakers themselves, the loudness and persistence of the offending sound, and environmental factors that can distort the audio. sound. Each of these can trigger a dramatic increase in stress levels, releasing typical hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that normally prime the individual for a fight-or-flight response. Of course, whether a person has the motivational intensity necessary to act on this stress response depends on the individual's resilience and ability to cope with other factors in the stress experience.. 49).