Most likely you think that there is no relationship between stress, asthma, music, and rats. In most cases you’d probably be right. But recent research has attempted to determine the effect of “music therapy” on stress responses in rats; in this case rats with asthma.
Lu et al. (2010) released a study where they examined the effect of Mozart’s Sonata K. 488 was played for rats who were induced with asthma. The Rats were all exposed to a stress environment and the music therapy group were additionally exposed to the music for 6 hours a day for 14 days. Their results indicated that the rats exposed to music also had less of a stress response than the non-music group.
This study goes into detail about the Mozart effect, of which the popularized view is that Mozart “makes you smarter”. The research doesn’t support the popularized view, rather it shows that music can be used to prep for auditory listening tasks or temporarily help with other cognitive tasks (c.f., Roth & Smith, 2008). These authors mostly focus on studies supporting the use of music for stress reduction, specifically music therapy as a supportive therapy for conditions such as asthma. They then tested their hypothesis… on rats.
What does this mean for music therapy? In my opinion a few things:
#1 People have emotional reactions and associations with music. Despite my personal tendency to personify animals (Secret of Nimh-style for mice and rats) it’s a huge leap for me to think that rats have these same associations to music. Rather, I would tend to think that musical stimuli can provide order (or simply temporal structure) within an unordered and stressful environment, perhaps even to rats…
#2 More importantly: the term “music therapy” is sometimes (often times) misused in the literature. I know that this is not music therapy (at least not in my scope of practice); rather, I’d term this “music listening for genus rattus con asthma”. Therapy implies growth, progress, and most importantly, a relationship. There was no evidence of a relationship between rats and lab staff in this study. 🙂
#3 This study doesn’t seem malicious, but rather done in the spirit of investigation. Why on rats? Well, you can’t induce asthma and stress on humans and then see if music helps (thank goodness for IRBs).
You might be asking yourself why I’m waisting your time with this. This was the first article that came up on PubMed when I searched “music therapy” this morning (in front of some professionals from other disciplines). Simply put – we should know what is representing our field.
References:
Roth EA, & Smith KH. (2008). The Mozart effect: evidence for the arousal hypothesis. Percept Mot Skills, 107(2), 396-402. PMID: 19093601