Physiological and psychological effects of listening to nursery rhymes

Abstract

Music has been known as a powerful tool that changes human moods and inducesemotional responses. The purpose of this study is to monitor changes in healthy individuals' physiological and psychological responses to listening to nursery rhymes in three different scenarios: the songs were played by a professional musician, a robot called Pepper, and finally a boombox. These scenarios are plates in actively engaged or passive modes. To measure arousal response, individuals were exposed to the nursery rhymes, and an electrodermal activity (EDA) wristband was used to track changes in their physiological factors: heart rate variability and skin conductance. Electroencephalography (EEG) headset can measure Brain wave activity which is the psychological response to music. EEG signals of healthy individuals were captured before, during, and after listening to the nursery rhymes using a 14-channels EEG headset. Two self-report questionnaires were designed to investigate individuals' psychological responses after listening to the rhymes. Ledalab and Kubios, Matlab toolboxes, were used to separate EDA data into its phasic and tonic components and extract non-linear, time and frequency-domain data from HRV data, respectively. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) was applied on the EEG data to separate brain wave sub-bands. To understand how human brain activity changes, statistical features such as average, standard deviation and energy, and entropy of wavelet for alpha and beta waves are extracted. Furthermore, SPSS software was used for all statistical analyses in order to make the correlation coeffcient between each pair of scenarios and between each pair of participants in each scenario was made. After analyzing individuals' sensors data and their responses to the questionnaires, no statistically significant results were found that correlated all participants' physiological and psychological changes. However, inconsistent trends such as increases in heart rates, decreases in skin conductance, and reporting feelings such as lively, alert, happy, cheerful, calm and relaxed were observed for some participants. Also the results indicated a direct relationship between human responses to the human and a robot player, while there was not any relation between boombox and robot or human players.