When people feel sad, overly stressed or have an emotional breakdown, music often becomes a convenient and personally meaningful way to regulate their emotions. A large number of questionnaires, experiments and review studies have shown that music-based emotion regulation is not only very common in daily life, but is also increasingly used in clinical and medical situations. But we still lack a complete framework to explain two key aspects clearly. One aspect is the exact conditions and the specific groups of people for whom music can truly improve mood. The other aspect is the situations where music may fail to work or even make people feel worse than before. Based on recent related empirical results, this paper proposes a Music-Person-Context (MPC) integration framework that focuses on emotion regulation. First, we gather and sort out existing evidence to discuss two things. The first is how musical features and lyrics shape the emotions that people get from music. The second is how these elements create possibilities for emotion regulation. Secondly, we bring together research on differences among individuals. These differences cover personal traits, clinical symptoms and demographic characteristics. We do this to explain why the same piece of music can improve some people's mood, but make others think too much about negative things or even make their bad emotions become stronger. Thirdly, we take different usage scenarios into account. These scenarios include daily music listening and structured intervention activities. We aim to clarify how social and institutional environments further influence the effect of music in regulating emotions. Based on this analysis, we explain how the MPC framework helps people understand the inconsistent results of previous studies. We also make specific predictions for future research and practical applications. In short, this article provides a systematic concept map. This map connects music parameters, the characteristics of listeners and music usage scenarios. By doing so, it offers a more comprehensive answer to a highly practical question: when a person is in a low mood, what kind of music should they listen to to "feel better"? It also answers another key question: under what conditions may music bring emotional risks to people instead.
Research Article
Open Access