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Are folks with consideration deficit dysfunction with or with out hyperactivity (ADHD) extra prone to take heed to background music whereas performing every day duties?
Kelly-Ann Lachance, a doctoral pupil in medical neuropsychology at Université de Montréal, determined to seek out out.
She and her supervisor, neuropsychologist and psychology professor Nathalie Gosselin, analyzed the responses of 434 younger adults between the ages of 17 and 30 to an internet survey about music listening habits.
“In lab studies, we rarely ask about listening habits, and yet it’s important because people differ in the amount of stimulation they need to perform a task optimally,” stated Lachance.
The outcomes had been revealed in Frontiers in Psychology in January 2025. Lachance stated she selected to publish in an open-access journal as a result of she wished to share her findings with a broader viewers.
“As a future clinician, I want to use research to help the individuals I follow,” she stated.
Launched on the finish of the pandemic, the examine relied fully on information collected via the survey.
“Some parts of it already existed, so we took the questions on music-listening habits and the subjective effects of background music and put them in an online questionnaire that could be completed in under 15 minutes,” defined Lachance.
To find out whether or not respondents had been ADHD or neurotypical, the survey included questions from the Grownup ADHD Self-Report Scale for DSM-5 (ASRS-5); 118 of the respondents screened as ADHD and 316 as neurotypical.
“The ASRS-5 is a quick way to assess ADHD symptoms,” Lachance famous.
Different questions within the survey assessed every respondent’s latest emotional state, stage of tension and depressive signs.
“Music is used to modulate emotions, so we wanted to include emotional functioning in the study,” defined Gosselin, who can also be director of UdeM’s Music, Feelings and Cognition Analysis Laboratory (MUSEC Laboratory) and a researcher at its guardian group, BRAMS (Worldwide Laboratory for Mind, Music and Sound Analysis).
Taking part in sports activities or learning
The examine examined variations in background music listening throughout a number of every day duties, together with cognitive actions equivalent to studying, writing and learning, and fewer cognitive actions equivalent to cooking, taking public transport and enjoying sports activities.
It discovered that folks with ADHD reported listening to background music whereas enjoying sports activities and whereas learning considerably greater than did neurotypicals.
Nonetheless, neurotypicals spent extra hours per week listening to music whereas not doing anything.
Whereas the researchers weren’t utterly stunned by the outcomes, they did not see them as a foregone conclusion.
“You could also imagine that music might interfere with performing a cognitively demanding task,” which may have made people with ADHD much less inclined to take heed to music on the similar time, stated Gosselin.
In reality, not solely do younger adults with ADHD wish to have music within the background whereas learning, they like music that’s stimulating somewhat than stress-free.
“Why stimulating music? The literature shows that people with ADHD need more activation to perform at the same optimal level as neurotypicals. Music could help with this, regardless of the type of activity,” defined Lachance.
“However, this is a hypothesis that requires future testing,” Gosselin identified.
A helpful behavior?
Is music in actual fact helpful for younger adults with ADHD? How does it have an effect on their focus and motivation? Gosselin has been questioning about this for a very long time.
“My first neuropsychology internship was in child psychiatry,” she recalled. “In one of my first cases, a father asked me if it was a good idea for his teen with attention difficulties to listen to music while studying. I didn’t know what to say because there was no conclusive data in the literature. But the question stayed with me.”
Since music is ubiquitous and available, it may very well be worthwhile in serving to folks handle ADHD signs.
“I’m not suggesting it could replace medication, but it could complement it,” stated Lachance. “The question is how we can use the full potential of music to promote optimal performance.”
Extra info:
Kelly-Ann Lachance et al, Listening habits and subjective results of background music in younger adults with and with out ADHD, Frontiers in Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1508181
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College of Montreal
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Music to their ears: Folks with ADHD might choose background music whereas performing every day duties (2025, April 3)
retrieved 3 April 2025
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