The Effect of Personality Variables, Dogmatism and Repression-Sensitization Upon Response to Music

This study is an exploration of how personality characteristics differentially effect response to music, specifically the effect of openness as measured by dogmatism, and defensive style as measured by the repression-sen-sitization and Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability scales. The subjects included 22 females and 16 males without any formal music training, ranging in age from 19 to 64 with a mean age of 33. The subjects individually listened to a series of 14 90-second musical segments ranging across seven different styles, and controlled for novelty, arousal level and complexity. The results indicated that dogmatism is positively (p < .05) and curvilinearly (p < .01) related to preference for different musical styles, positively (p < .001) correlated with a lack of differentiation in evaluating musical segments, and unrelated to GSR response to music. Defensive style was curvilinearly (p < .05) related to GSR response to music, not related to the amount of emotional versus cognitive awareness content expressed to music, and positively (p < .05) related to the amount of anxiety expressed in awareness to music.