Young people’s uses of music for emotional immersion

Abstract

Children are typically able to integrate emotion information from multiple cues by the age of 8 years, although their developmental trajectory for understanding emotions appears to slow down as they enter adolescence. Adolescence is a period of intense emotions and the age group with the highest consumption of music. In this chapter, we argue that young people may be emotionally immersing in music as a way of ‘practising’ negative emotions and developing their emotional regulation skills. We present data showing that emotional immersion is one mechanism through which music is linked with wellbeing among young people. An international survey of 372 participants shows that young people use music more to immerse in sadness and anger than those aged over 25 years. Finally, studies in which angry or sad mood was evoked reveal that participants select music that allowed them to immerse in these emotions which helped to process them.