The Influence of Music on Emotional Regulation: A Thematic Review

Abstract

Emotion regulation is a key concept in psychology. It refers to the ways people influence the emotions they experience, when they experience them, and how those emotions are expressed. One of the most influential frameworks in this area is Gross’s (1998) process model, which distinguishes between antecedent-focused strategies, such as cognitive reappraisal, and response-focused strategies, such as expressive suppression. Music occupies a unique position within this framework. It can act both as an emotional stimulus that creates feelings and as a tool that people intentionally use to manage those feelings. This dual role makes music psychologically fascinating, but it also makes it difficult to study. A single listening experience can both generate an emotion and help regulate that same emotion. Rather than viewing music as a simple influence on mood, this review treats it as a psychological process in which emotion, cognition, and sound interact with one another. The review is organised around eight interconnected themes: (i) emotion-regulation strategies and their classification; (ii) adaptive and maladaptive outcomes of music use; (iii) personality traits and individual differences; (iv) neurobiological mechanisms; (v) cognitive reappraisal and coping processes; (vi) everyday and therapeutic uses of music; (vii) musical mechanisms, including feature-dependent and individual-dependent effects; and (viii) the moderating roles of age, gender, and musical genre.