Preliminary Study on Construction of TCM Emotion Music Treatment Database / 中国中医药信息杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To structure the music database of TCM emotion treatment based on the TCM emotion theory and subjective emotion experience, setting the music played by Chinese musical instruments as materials. Methods This study adopted qualitative analysis and recruited 71 subjects (including 274 valid descriptions for emotion elicited by music) to select the names of music and to divide emotional categories of music. Then, 37 subjects (3132 valid evaluation) were adopted to assess emotional categories, degrees of favorite and familiarity for each piece of music by using quantitative analysis. Finally, 3 domain experts were invited to select music, to analyze music emotion, and to construct initially the database for TCM emotion treatment. Results Totally 120 songs were selected and eight emotional categories were divided, which were feelings of calm, refreshing, pleasure, detached, releasing, encouraging, expressing and pouring out. There was a moderate correlation between degrees of favorite and familiarity (average value of correlation coefficients after Fisher Z transformation was 0.50). The scores of anxiety correlated negatively with the degrees of favorite in the type of pleasure (r=-0.41, P=0.017). Accordingly, the methods of selecting music and regulation for five kinds of abnormal emotions in TCM were proposed. Conclusion This study preliminary establishes the TCM emotion music treatment database, providing standardized music and operable methods of regulating abnormal emotion for clinical TCM treatment.