Clinicians are encouraged to use non-pharmacologic interventions first as part of the treatment of responsive behaviours due to mental health conditions. Music therapy is an example of such an intervention. In recent years, there has been an increased research focus on individualized music (IM) because it considers patient’s personal music preferences. However, the findings of whether IM listening is more beneficial than general music listening has been inconsistent.

This study is to further compare the effects of IM and elevator (baseline) music listening on enjoyment behaviours of geriatric inpatients.

Fifteen participants were recruited from a geriatric psychiatry unit in an acute tertiary mental health facility in British Columbia, Canada. Their mean age was 74 years and their mean MMSE was 18. Each participant attended two 30-minute music listening sessions. Each session included a 15-minute baseline music playlist and a 15-minute IM playlist. The sequence of the two playlists was counterbalanced for each participant across the two sessions. The IM playlists were created by interviewing each participant with a personalized music preference questionnaire. The baseline (elevator) playlist was simply consisted of instrumental, non-lyrical jazz and classical music and was the same for every participant. The enjoyment behaviors during the sessions for each participant were measured by the Enjoyment Behavioral Coding Scheme (EBCS), which was developed for this project based on previous literature and was shown to have a good inter rater reliability.

The average total scores of the EBCS across two sessions of IM and baseline music listening were calculated for each participant. Paired samples t-test was used to compare the scores. Though the mean total score of the EBCS for IM session was higher than that for the baseline session, the t-test showed the difference did not reach statistical significance.

Participants appeared to enjoy both the IM and baseline music sessions equally.