Thanks to Rick for posting the link to this new Mozart effect
study. I have read the study and here are a few comments...
The authors cite studies which report benefits to playing music
in neonatal ICUs, including weight gain, and hypothesize that the
weight gain is due to reduced energy expenditure while resting.
They cite no literature to support this contention nor do they
postulate a mechanism by which music should produce this effect.
This type of reasoning is common in the "Mozart effect"
literature. Miraculous outcomes are predicted and there is only
handwaving when one asks "how" and "why" questions.
One consequence of the vagueness of mechanism is that one doesn't
know what is the appropriate control condition. In this report,
the comparison is Baby Mozart CD vs silence. There are lots of
possible controls: music of other genres, mozart music played
backwards, repetitive beeps, the mewing of kittens, white noise
and so forth. The choice of the control condition depends upon
the hypothesized mechanism of action. If the effect is produced
by general auditory stimulation then the mewing of kittens or
repetitive beeps may be just as effective as Mozart.
The design of the study is fairly simple but there are some
oddities in the procedure worth mentioning. The study used a
mixed-design with each subject experiencing either silence or
music in separate sessions and order was counter-balanced across
subjects. Each session was 30 min long with the 1st 10 min
serving as baseline. The measure of interest was consumption of
oxygen and production of CO2.
Here are some of the oddities:
Random assignment and order counter-balancing: The study began
with 20 infants; 2 were excluded prior to the study. The
remaining 18 were divided in the following fashion: n = 13 for
silence-first and n = 5 for music-first. If there is a concern
about measurement drift (see below) then the unbalanced order is
a problem.
Measurement of metabolic activity: Measurement was not done
directly but indirectly. There is some technical measurement
issue here that is beyond me but the article then states "For
controlling for interobserver variation, all measurements were
performed by a single investigator (Dr Lubetzky)." Here is what
I take from that sentence. The scores you get from this measure
depends on both the machine and the person operating the machine.
The person operating the machine is the lead author of the
study. The person operating the machine was not blind to the
hypothesis or group assignment. This statement is not meant to
accuse Dr Lubetzky of impropriety but that there may be a genuine
methodological danger here.
Ken
PS - As a freebie, here is an alternative interpretation of the
study which assumes the difference is real and postulates the
mechanism of action. When is an infant showing low metabolic
activity? One safe guess would be when it is quiet and not
moving about. In other words, when it is asleep. (Measurements
in the study were taken during nap time in the study.) Loud
transient noises in the ICU produce startle-like twitches and
other responses which lead to increased metabolic activity
associated with the movement. The Mozart music is a masking
noise that blunts the effects of noise in the ICU. If this is
true then any masking noise (like white noise) should be just as
effective in blocking responses to ICU noises. So the metabolic
prediction is Mozart == white noise < no stimulus.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected]
Professor and Assistant Chairperson
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
---------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Froman wrote:
...on weight of pre-term infants. The abstract is here:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/peds.2009-0990v1?papetoc
and the pdf of the article is here:
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/peds.2009-0990v1
Rick
Dr. Rick Froman, Chair
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, AR 72761
[email protected]
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