Emotionality and performance: An emotion-regulation approach to music performance anxiety

Emotion-regulation abilities and skills are important determinants of performance success, as they lead to emotional stability and psychological well-being in the course of practicing and performing. Research on musicians’ emotionality has revealed a positive relationship between music performance anxiety (MPA) and the temperamental factors of emotional reactivity, low self-esteem, and maladaptive coping, with sex as a moderator in these relationships. In the current study, we attempted to analyze the structure of the relationships between selected variables using the assumptions of the developmental model of human emotionality as a framework for a proposed MPA regulation model. Students at music academies (N = 196) completed the EAS Temperament Survey, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the modified Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale, the Brief-COPE Inventory, and the revised Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory. The results confirm the regularities found in the general population, female musicians showing more intense negative emotionality, temperamental activity traits, emotional awareness, and the use of emotional support strategies. In turn, male musicians obtained medium results on measures of temperamental traits, and often used problem-orientation and perspective-change strategies for emotion regulation. In general, both male and female musicians scored within the medium range for MPA. Tests of the MPA regulation model showed two pathways from temperamental traits to coping strategies: from sociability to problem orientation, and from emotionality to perspective change. There was a positive relationship between the use of the problem-orientation strategy and MPA. The major predictor negatively related to MPA was the use of the perspective-change strategy. The direction of relationships may indicate that techniques for accepting experience are more effective than control techniques for reducing MPA in the context of public performance.