The Role of Active Musical Listening to Enhance the Emotional Health on Early Motherhood

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identified the role of active musical listening on emotional health and well-being in Javanese early motherhood. Listening to music will not only have a soothing and uplifting effects on someone but also a positive influence on the unborn baby. Feeling emotional during pregnancy is common because of hormonal changes. And it‟s natural to feel more stressed or anxious than usualy. Although it‟s normal to have periods of worry and stress when pregnancy and this can be a sign of something more serious such as depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. Emotional health is a state of wellbeing. An one way anova test with the pre-posttest scores as the control revealed that the changes by listening the gendhing gamelan were significantly decreased in the experimental group compared with the control group. A randomized experimental study design was developed and implemented. A hundred and twenty of first trimester pregnant women were randomly assigned to music listening (n=60) and control (n=60) groups (mean age=29.0; SD=5.0). The experiment group received 5 minutes of music intervention and the control group received only general prenatal care. Psychological health was assessed using three self -report measures: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Beck-Depression Inventory (BDI). The result shows significant effect (p<0.05; F=5.340) of gendhing gamelan to reduce stress and enhance the emotional well-being in early motherhood thus the hypotheses is accepted. The findings can be used to encourage early motherhood to use this cost-effective method of listening music in their daily life to reduce their stress and enhance the emotional wellbeing. Further research is needed to test the long-term benefits.

Keywords

• emotional health; well-being; music listening; gendhing gamelan