Psychological and Psychophysiological Effects of Music Intensity and Lyrics on Simulated Urban Driving

To investigate the effect of musical characteristics (i.e., presence of lyrics and loudness) during simulated urban driving. Previous work has seldom isolated musical characteristics and examined these both singularly and interactively. We investigated the potentially distracting effects of processing lyrics through exposing young drivers to the same piece of music with/without lyrics and at different sound intensities (60 dBA [soft] and 75 dBA7 [loud]) using a counterbalanced, within-subjects design (N = 34; Mage = 22.2 years, SD = 2.0 years). Six simulator conditions were included that comprised low-intensity music with/without lyrics, high-intensity music with/without lyrics plus two controls – ambient incar noise and spoken lyrics. Between-subjects variables of driving style (defensive vs. assertive) and sex (women vs. men) were explored. A key finding was that the no lyrics/soft condition yielded lower affective arousal scores when compared to the other musicconditions. There was no main effect of condition for HRV data (SDNN and RMSSD). Exploratory analyses showed that, for assertive drivers, NASA-TLX Performance scores were lower in the no lyrics/soft condition compared to the lyrics/loud condition. Moreover,women exhibited higher mean heart rate than men in the presence of lyrics. Although some differences emerged in subjective outcomes, these were not replicated in HRV, which wasused as an objective index of emotionality. Drivers should consider the use of soft, non19lyrical music to optimise their affective state during urban driving.