Empowered listening: Self-selected music’s role in uplifting emotions during stress
Caitlin Fountain, Jeffrey J. Klibert, Laura A. Stambaugh, Kaitlin Bountress, Saranga Bansal, Lawrence Locker · 2026
Read Empowered listening: Self-selected music’s role in uplifting emotions during stress by Caitlin Fountain, Jeffrey J. Klibert, Laura A. Stambaugh, Kaitlin Bountress, Saranga Bansal, Lawrence Locker (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13314476.txt.
Description
Caitlin Fountain and co-workers test how self-chosen music lifts mood after stress in a 2026 study. Music is more and more used as a low-cost aid for well-being and calm, yet how song type shapes emotion repair after a blow was not well mapped.
The study began with a screen of 795 undergraduate students in the United States, counted in the report, who rated their music tastes. Those ratings built personal playlists of two kinds: upbeat and fast songs meant to empower, and upbeat but slow songs meant to calm. After a social rejection stress task, students heard their music while the team tracked gains in positive feelings and drops in negative ones. The design shows whether picking your own songs, and their tempo, changes how fast mood recovers.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Caitlin Fountain, Jeffrey J. Klibert, Laura A. Stambaugh, Kaitlin Bountress, Saranga Bansal, Lawrence Locker |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 68447 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |