Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Many older adults turn to music for comfort, memory, and a sense of calm, yet the feelings that arise depend on more than the track itself. How a listener arrives at a piece of music may shape what they feel. A new experiment with community-dwelling older adults in China suggests that a short spell of mindfulness before listening can tilt those music-evoked feelings towards calmer and more expansive experiences.
Researchers at Sichuan Normal University randomly assigned adults aged 60 and over to two groups. The study appears in Frontiers in Psychology. One group completed a guided body-scan mindfulness meditation for ten minutes before listening, and the other rested quietly for the same time, then heard the same kind of music.
198 people were recruited from Chinese communities; after listwise deletion for missing data, 191 remained in the analysis, with 96 in the mindfulness music group and 95 in the music listening group. Mean ages were about 69.2 years in the mindfulness group and 68.6 years in the quiet-rest group. None reported prior formal mindfulness training, and just over half of each group were women.
After the pre-listening period, both groups heard five randomly chosen two-minute instrumental excerpts drawn from a pool of 25 contemporary Chinese popular music pieces, presented through headphones. They then rated music-evoked aesthetic emotions on the Geneva Emotional Music Scale, a 33-item measure covering nine dimensions, with music familiarity and musical expertise entered as covariates. State mindfulness rose more in the mindfulness group from before to after listening, with all comparisons below a p value of 0.001.
Musical aesthetic emotions are feelings tied to how listeners appraise music as an aesthetic object, rather than everyday moods alone. The nine dimensions include wonder, transcendence, power, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, joyful activation, tension, and sadness.
The multivariate group effect was significant after covariate adjustment. After false discovery rate correction, the mindfulness group scored higher on transcendence and peacefulness, and the quiet-rest music group scored higher on sadness. No corrected differences appeared for wonder, power, tenderness, nostalgia, joyful activation, or tension, although tension was lower in the mindfulness group before correction.
The mindfulness audio guided attention to bodily sensations and breathing without trying to change or judge them. The design tested immediate effects of a brief induction rather than a long training course.
The study has clear limits: outcomes were self-reported only after listening, so the work speaks to immediate ratings rather than lasting change, and only one age band was studied. Informal mindfulness practice was not screened, and affect was not measured between the induction and the music, so residual calm from the meditation itself cannot be fully separated from music-evoked change. The excerpts were contemporary Chinese popular instrumentals, which may not generalise to other repertoires.
Earlier work with younger listeners already linked brief mindfulness to shifts in music-related emotion. This study extends that pattern to later life and shows a selective profile: more transcendence and peacefulness, less sadness, rather than a blanket rise across every feeling.
