Emotion Goals in Music Performance Anxiety

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Music Performance Studies

Background:

• Performance anxiety is often viewed as detrimental, leading to efforts to reduce it.
• Emerging research suggests that sometimes, upregulating anxiety can enhance performance.
• Understanding musicians' emotion goals is crucial for performance outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the emotion goals musicians hold during performances.
• To explore how desired emotional states and outward emotional displays influence performance anxiety.
• To examine the relationship between emotion goals and performance satisfaction.

Main Methods:

• Study 1 (N=44) surveyed musicians on their desired emotional states and appearance during performance.
• Study 2 (N=32) assigned musicians to different emotion goals (feel/not show anxiety vs. not feel/not show anxiety).
• State unease and performance satisfaction were measured in Study 2.

Main Results:

• Most musicians aimed to neither feel nor show anxiety, but some wanted to feel anxiety without showing it.
• Musicians pursuing a goal to feel but not show anxiety reported more unease.
• Enacting a goal to neither feel nor show anxiety correlated with less unease and higher performance satisfaction.

Conclusions:

• Musicians' emotion goals, encompassing both internal feelings and external appearance, significantly impact performance anxiety.
• The desire to feel anxiety, even if not displayed, can lead to negative outcomes like increased unease.
• These findings offer insights into managing performance emotions for better outcomes in musicians.