• Music Psychology,  Websites of interest

    Happy New Year!

    May I take this opportunity to wish you, dear reader, a very happy and prosperous 2012! I am in Spain at the moment with my family recovering from a rather splendid evening of celebrations. My mind (despite its somewhat foggy state) is now turning to thoughts of the year ahead.   There are many things to look forward to in the world of music psychology in 2012. One great source of excitement is the International Conference on Music Psychology and Cognition (ICMPC12) which this year will be twinned with a meeting of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 8). The conference will be held in the…

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  • Music & Consumer Behaviour,  Music Psychology

    Music and driving

    Over the past two weeks I have been involved in a music psychology project that was the brainchild of an insurance company called Quotemehappy.com. They were interested to look at the relationship between musical genre preferences and driving behaviour across a large sample of UK drivers. The company hired a polling organisation to run a questionnaire across over 2000 members of the public and then sent the data to me. What did we find? Aggression: Some of the results replicated those reported in an article that I wrote with Nikki Dibben (Dibben & Williamson, 2007). People who listen to drum and bass and heavy metal music were more likely than…