Escuta musical na inibição de resposta a pistas alimentares e neutras

Abstract

Inhibitory control is an executive function that allows the control of attention, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Thus, it is subdivided into attentional inhibition, cognitive inhibition and response inhibition. Listening to music, in turn, has the potential to evoke emotional states and activate cortical regions important for inhibitory control, suggesting that it can trigger some effect on inhibitory performance. The current research aims to evaluate the effect of listening to music on inhibitory control. For this, a randomized clinical trial with adult subjects was carried out in which all participants underwent, in counterbalanced order, two conditions: music (intervention condition) and visual art (comparison condition). In each condition, participants watched a video (instrumental music or abstract visual art) and performed the Go/No-Go task (measurement of motor response inhibition), which contains a potentially hedonic food-based and a neutral subtask. Subjective assessments of emotional state and intensity, as well as condition familiarity and agreeableness, were performed after the task. Data collection took place entirely in remote format. Forty-one volunteers participated in this study. Thirty-four participants had their data included and analyzed in this study. The results show that there was no difference between the conditions in response inhibition performance, as well as in subjective assessments of emotional state, emotional intensity, and stimulus familiarity. Exceptionally, the music video was rated significantly more enjoyable than the visual art. Therefore, in the current study, no significant effect of listening to music was found on inhibitory control, more specifically on response inhibition to food and neutral cues, although the musical stimulus was considered pleasurable by the participants.