Paper Topic:

Music Therapy as a Therapeutic Tool

This study , entitled The Effect of Background Music on Task Performance in Psychotic Children ' used music therapy to determine if its use would encourage more on-task responses in four boys . All four boys were diagnosed with either autism or schizophrenia according to guidelines issued by the Mississippi State Department of Education . The boys ranged in age from five to nine years old . They were all students in a class restricted to those who exhibited some type of emotional handicap in Tupelo , Mississippi

All the boys had previously shown self-stimulation responses which made

br it difficult for them to achieve their assigned tasks . For this 1989 study , the boys were given a color sorting task involving colored chips whereby they were to sort the colored chips into the container of the corresponding color , a task with which they were familiar

For the purposes of the study , the boys were given a large amount of chips to sort that far exceeded what they could accomplish in the allotted five minute time frame based on previous episodes with this task . Each boy was placed in a baseline setting that removed him from the activity of the classroom via movable partitions to reduce distractions . The intervention phase included the addition of George Winston 's December ' a musical selection lacking a strong and rhythmic beat . This musical selection was piped in at 40 dB through speakers mounted about six feet behind him . Each boy had two baseline sessions and two intervention sessions

The researchers hypothesized that...

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