Table 1.
Participant demographics and health and wellbeing scores for each experimental condition.
Fig 1.
Participants were randomly allocated to one of four groups: (i) no choice and low complexity track, (ii) no choice and high complexity track, (iii) perceived choice and low complexity track, (iv) perceived choice and high complexity track. In the perceived choice conditions, participants listened to four 2-second music clips and selected which piece of music they wanted to listen to in full. Participants were naïve to the fact that they were listening to different parts of the same song (i.e., the final ‘chosen’ song was predetermined by their randomly assigned experimental condition.
Table 2.
Pain reduction scores for each experimental condition.
Fig 2.
Violin plots of pain scores in each experimental condition.
Plots depict the distributions of pain scores and their changes in response to music in each of the experimental condition.
Fig 3.
Residual plots of hierarchical linear models.
Plots depict the relationship between the predicted residual values against the observed values for each model. To depict the choice by active engagement interaction on pain intensity scores plots for each level of choice are shown with model fit depicted according to active engagement. The plot lines fitted to the data are used to illustrate the degree to which the relationship between choice and pain changes depending on different levels of active engagement. The lines illustrate that higher levels of active engagement predict larger decreases in pain intensity in the perceived choice condition. Individual levels of active engagement were also the strongest predictor of decreases in pain unpleasantness.
Table 3.
Results of multilevel modelling for pain intensity reductions.
Table 4.
Results of multilevel modelling for pain unpleasantness reductions.