Emotional-Familiarity processing fluency moderates the Anxiety-Resilience association: evidence from a Chinese...

Music is widely used as an emotion regulation resource, yet music preference is often conceptualized as a stable taste rather than as a context-sensitive processing tendency expressed under affective demand. Drawing on processing fluency and experiential engagement frameworks, the present study examined whether an experiential music preference composite-integrating emotional connectedness and familiarity-modulates the association between anxiety and psychological resilience. Across specifications, the anxiety-resilience association increased as MF_EF increased; this conditional pattern was most evident for state anxiety, whereas the incremental moderating contribution in trait-anxiety models was smaller after accounting for MF_04. These results suggest that emotionally meaningful and familiar music engagement may be better characterized as a conditional experiential resource that becomes salient under transient anxiety, rather than a uniform buffer. These findings refine feature-level accounts of music-based emotion regulation by distinguishing experiential engagement from structural preference processes, while also underscoring the correlational nature of the evidence and the need for longitudinal and cross-cultural validation.