Mood Management via the Digital Jukbox
Knobloch & Zillman

Research takes top 30 music to evaluate its energy and joyfulness. Participants were places in states of bad, neutral, or good moods, and then allowed to choose between a selection of music. This was done using computer software that recorded individual exposure times.

Respondents in bad moods elected to listen to highly energetic-joyful music for longer periods than did repsondents in good moods. They were more decisive in exercising their music preferences.

Contemporary Americans spend at least 3 ½ hours a day listening to media-provided music.

The theory of mood management is based on the hedonistic idea that individuals seek to experience the highest degree of pleasure attainable under given circumstances.
People are motivated to make entertainment choices that will help them to diminish or terminate negative moods and to extend and enhance good moods

Mood-management theory has established that mood-specific selections are partial to stimulation that is
a) Excitationally opposite to prevailing aversive arousal states
b) Hedonically superior to prevailing affective states,
c) Entails cognitions of little or no semantic affinity with the cognitions that define prevailing aversive experiences

The investigation attempts to bypass difficulties by
a) Placing respondents into actual moods
b) Allowing them to make unrestrained musical choices from a sample

Conditions of bad, neutral, and good mood were created,