Chronic Pain, Music, and Cognitition: Application of Chaos Theory and Decomplexification (2011)

Undergraduates: Alicia Mullis, none none none

Faculty Advisor: Mark Hollins
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Chronic pain is a major public health problem associated with widespread physical and cognitive difficulties, but its etiology and the effectiveness of music therapy in treatment remains incompletely understood. The current study investigates the decomplexification hypothesis of chronic pain and the possible recomplexification of music. Forty-one participants from the PSYC 101 pool completed a number prediction task based on an equation taken from chaos theory and also were tested on a linear letter-counting task. Background information about music involvement and pain history was also collected through survey methods to assess possible sources of differences between participants. Current involvement in music at least once per week did have a protective effect for participants with chronic pain for both tasks but appeared to be associated with impaired performance on both tasks for participants without chronic pain. Interestingly, the first block of data in the number prediction task actually demonstrated improved performance for people with chronic pain relative to controls without regard to their musical background. Data measuring improvement in performance throughout the task suggests that if more data were collected, people with chronic pain would be expected to have worse overall performance than participants without chronic pain as expected. These results provide support for the recomplexification theory but decomplexification theory requires more investigation.