How Culture and Musical Engagement Shape Musical Reward Sensitivity in Danish Teens: A Validation Study of the Danish Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire With 4641 Adolescents.

The ability to convey emotions and induce pleasure is one of the most important aspects of the way that music becomes meaningful to humans. Affective responses to music are specific to both cultural and personal preferences, but little is known about the individual variability in adolescence. The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) is a psychometric measure that identifies five factors associated with musical pleasure: Musical Seeking, Emotional Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, and Sensory-Motor.

Learning to play a musical instrument in the middle school is associated with superior audiovisual working memory and fluid intelligence: A cross-sectional behavioral study.

Music training, in all its forms, is known to have an impact on behavior both in childhood and even in aging. In the delicate life period of transition from childhood to adulthood, music training might have a special role for behavioral and cognitive maturation. Among the several kinds of music training programs implemented in the educational communities, we focused on instrumental training incorporated in the public middle school curriculum in Italy that includes both individual, group and collective (orchestral) lessons several times a week.