The influences of music training on decision making in Thai adolescence

Abstract

Adolescent period is an important development phase in the human life span. During this period the reward and emotional brain becomes fully development, but the prefrontal cortex remains not fully developed. The prefrontal cortex becomes fully mature at 25 years old, therefore, the decision-making in adolescence is mostly lead by risk behavior. Several studies have found the advantage of music training in the promotion of the executive function that regulate the reward and emotional brain. This study is aimed at examining the influence of music training on decision making in adolescent by comparing the decision-making performance of the adolescent in musician and non-musician groups. Ex post facto research design was applied to compare the mean of decision-making score between continuous musician training and non-music training group by using independent sample t-test statistic. A questionnaire was applied to collect data to analyze the difference in backgrounds regarding general information, family, health, and extra curriculum. Sample population of this study was composed of the total number of 76 students: 33 boys and 43 girls, in the 11th grade. The target group refers to musician with four years or more training, which included 16 boys and 22 girls. The control group refers to non-music training which included 17 Boys and 21 girls. Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a standardized test for decision-making evaluation was applied to calculate decision making score. The Independent sample t-test was performed to evaluate the mean differences of the dependent variables (IGT score) between the target and control groups. This research found that continuous music training group showed higher means score of cool decision making than non-music training group. The impact of this study suggests that extra curriculum activated in music training in school is advantage when promoting cool decision making in adolescence.