My Honors Thesis and Research

I know this may interest some of you or utterly bore some of you, but many of you asked me about my honors research and thesis in a variety of ways:

“How goes the thesis monster?”
“What are you…ew… never mind I’ll come back later”
“You’ve been starring very intently at that blank page for a while. What’re you writing?” 

At any rate, I’m posting my abstract and a link to what I worked on for a little over a year and a half, protocol to execution to write-up. Do let me know if you have any comments or questions in the comments section or by email. Don’t worry – my posts won’t always have such dry content…I’m trying to cater to everyone!

Here is the link and here is the abstract:

Research has shown that music therapy can help subjects suffering from mood disorders, such as depression, to improve their moods (Maratos, 2009). We first discuss the fields of music cognition and music therapy, then move to a discussion of depression and music therapy’s role in its treatment. We then present a study designed to explore the effects of active participation in music versus the passive listening to music judged to express happiness – on normal individuals and individuals with potentially depressive symptoms. Results showed that music interventions helped improve mood in our study populations as a whole, but no single intervention stood out over the other. Interestingly, the group that chose its own music improved more than the groups who we gave a CD of music chosen by a focus group. We then discuss implications for future research.