Psychobiological mechanisms of the effectiveness of music interventions

The present thesis aimed to determine the psychobiological mechanisms of the purported beneficial effectiveness of music interventions. For this purpose, two studies were conducted. In a first study, the associations between music listening and health were investigated under consideration of predicted mediating mechanisms. In a second study, we set out to examine the assumed stress-reducing effect of listening to relaxing music in a rigorously controlled experiment in a laboratory setting across neuroendocrine, autonomic, cognitive, and emotional domains of the acute stress experience in healthy participants.