Topic: Can music affect your mental health or even help reduce stress?

Thoma, M. V., La Marca, R., Brönnimann, R., Finkel, L., Ehlert, U., & Nater, U. M. (2013). The effect of music on the human stress response. PLoS ONE, 8(8), e70156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0070156

The purpose of this article was to examine how different sounds affect someone’s stress levels, whether that means raising or reducing them. Using sixty volunteers and randomly assigning them to three different conditions before a stress test. The three conditions were relaxing music (RM), rippling water (SW), and no sound (R). They also made sure to track their salivary cortisol , salivary alpha-amylase (sAA), heart rate (HR), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Salivary cortisol here is measuring stress through cortisol levels, sAA here measures enzymes that show said stress levels, HR just tells you how fast your heart is beating, and RSA measures your heart rate and your breathing seeing how well you can relax. Their findings here was that the relaxing music prior to the stress test, worked in decreasing stress levels. Compared to the others, listening to music beforehand helped prepare the participants for the upcoming stressor ahead. In general they found that music lowered heart rate and cortisol levels. Mainly showing how music can positively benefit people in their physical and emotional health. Essentially, proving my research that music can positively help someone’s mental health or just in general be considered a good thing. 

Topic: Can temperature affect sleeping patterns, and is it correlated to negative emotions?

Obradovich, N., Migliorini, R., Mednick, S. C., & Fowler, J. H. (2017). Nighttime temperature and human sleep loss in a changing climate. Science Advances, 3(5). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1601555

The purpose of this study was to analyze how temperature was correlated to affecting people’s sleeping patterns and how in some cases directly related to negative health effects or even sleeping disorders. To see whether or not this was the case they collected a data set of individuals who reported monthly about their insufficient sleep and how it was linked to data about temperature. Their individual responses came directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) and were pooled over a period from 2002-2011. And the randomly selected individuals had to answer a very specific question “During the past 30 days, for about how many days have you felt you did not get enough rest or sleep?” Combining the responses from this with their interview date, geolocation, daily temperature, precipitation, and climate data from the National Centers for Environmental Information Global Historical Climatology Network– Daily (GHCN-D). The study formed a concept about a theoretical relationship on how temperature anomalies were affecting sleep quality. And their findings concluded that rising temperatures especially at night due to climate change and other factors were contributing to sleep loss. The higher the temperature rises the less sleep an individual would get, highlighting my research and showing that it does in fact worsen sleep quality and might in some cases be linked to negative emotions. The study mainly talks about sleep loss though, however you could infer that being sleep deprived affects your health severely. 

Topic: Sleep deprivation and how it affects physical performance?

Zhao, S., Alhumaid, M. M., Li, H., Wei, X., Chen, S. S., Jiang, H., Gong, Y., Gu, Y., & Qin, H. (2025). Exploring the effects of sleep deprivation on Physical performance: An EEG Study in the Context of High-Intensity Endurance. Sports Medicine – Open, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-024-00807-4

The purpose of this study is highlighting how sleep deprivation can limit someone’s physical endurance and performance. To show whether or not sleep deprivation affects physical performance they selected twenty male firefighters with no history of mental disorders and to assess sleep conditions they used Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). For the selected individuals they mainly focused on people with a minimum of three years of experience, no sleep disorders, normal vision, and no history of anything affecting their cognitive function. All people are subjected to both conditions with normal sleep and sleep deprivation and having to endure an intense treadmill exercise after each condition. And if you met certain criteria like respiratory distress, high systolic blood pressure, high heart rate, etc then you were terminated. Their findings for this study was that a lack of sleep affected people’s reaction times making them react much more slowly than they originally would on normal sleep. Thus, reducing their stamina, endurance, and their ability to focus on the high-intensity exercises. And in general showcasing that people sleep deprived have a limited ability of what they can do because of the lack of sleep they received. This article highlights my research and how sleep deprivation can highly affect someone’s ability to focus on a task and how it can make it harder for people with limited amounts of sleep.