Affective and Cognitive Adjustment of Grief through Listening to Monaural Beats with TENG Music Overlay

Grief is a complex emotional response to the loss of a loved one or a significant life event and grief can manifest as various psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety. Finding effective interventions to alleviate grief and its associating symptoms is crucial for supporting individuals who are experiencing this challenging emotional state. Sound therapy such as monaural beats (MB) shows promise in altering perception of grief. Thus, the current research aimed to investigate the potential of MB overlaid with TENG music as a therapeutic tool for relieving grief-related symptoms.

This study employed a randomised controlled trial design with two experimental conditions: the MB stimulation group and a control group. The MB stimulation group received auditory stimulation with a 40 Hz MB overlaid with TENG instrumental music, while the control group received a placebo auditory stimulus consisting of only the TENG instrumental music. Two hundred and forty-nine participants between the age of 18 to 59 were recruited for this study and randomised into one of the two conditions.

Of which, 142 participants completed two cognitive experiments on emotional processing. All participants went through a grief-induction procedure and assessed for their emotions, anxiety, and cognitive processing of emotional stimuli. We profiled the 249 participants into three groups ranging from low to high anxiety: Low Anxieties, Trait Anxieties, and General Anxieties. We observed that participants who listened to the soundtrack containing MB reported heightened high arousal negative emotions particularly among those who were more anxious, reduced somatic anxiety among General Anxieties but increased somatic anxiety among Trait Anxieties, reduced counterfactual thinking domain of grief rumination among General Anxieties, enhanced inhibition towards sad emotional stimuli, and reduce false memory for death- and colour-related words.

These findings suggests that TENG music with monaural beats demonstrates potential as a versatile tool for enhancing mental health and individual wellbeing.