Music Psychology
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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…
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Preparing for a music psychology course
I have been getting some nice emails of late from people who are considering a music psychology postgraduate degree, and who want to know how best to prepare for such a course. So today I am going to lay out a few pieces of general advice for postgraduate students thinking about taking up music psychology. The first important point to make is that each course is different. I work at the University of Sheffield which boasts 3 courses in music psychology that focus on the science of understanding how music affects the brain and body (with 1 focusing specifically on education and 1 designed specially for musicians). The advice I give…
