Proceedings of the Ninth Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 17-22 August 2015, Manchester, UK Ginsborg, J., Lamont, A., Phillips, M., Bramley, S. (Editors) The influence of personality, experience and gender on the subjectively perceived effect of music while gaming Isabell Bötsch, *1 Richard von Georgi #2 * Institute for Music Education, Technical University Brunswick, Germany # International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Germany # Institute for Music science and Music education, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany 1 i.boetsch@tu-braunschweig.de, 2 richard.von.georgi@musik.uni-giessen.de ABSTRACT Background Few studies have examined the impact of music while gaming. Experimental research studies investigated effects of music on immersion and the aesthetic perception of the virtual environment of games (e.g. Lipscomb & Zehnder, 2004), on performance in Racing games (e.g. Cassidy & McDonald, 2008, 2009, 2010; North & Hargreaves, 1999), and on emotions such as fear (e.g. Yamada, 2008). Besides methodological short comings of those studies general statements about the influence of music on the gaming experience are not possible, because a) only a specific game of one genre was played and b) music was chosen by experimenter based on different criteria. Furthermore individual factors like experience with video games and personality and their effects on how music is perceived were predominantly ignored. In a first study a questionnaire, which based on a pool of 146 Items about the general use, relevance of music while gaming and its effects was constructed via factor- and scale-analyses. The scales could be validated by two pre-studies (Bötsch, 2014; Bötsch, I., von Georgi, R. & Bullerjahn, C., 2014a; Bötsch, I., von Georgi, R. & Bullerjahn, C., 2014b). Aims This study at hand investigates the influence of experience with video games, gender and personality on subjectively perceived effects of music during gaming. Furthermore it was assumed that gender covaries with experience, because male gamers often got a higher expertise than female gamers. Method 200 students (108 female, 92 male; M=24.2; SD=4.9) with an average gaming experience of 8.5 years (SD=5.6) completed questionnaires on personality (PANAS-d; SKI) and on subjectively perceived effects of music while gaming (CamQ), which consists the following scales: perceived effect (PE) (α=0.93), disturbance of concentration (DC) (α=0.89), personal music preference (PM) (α=0.90) and game-external relevance of soundtracks (ER) (α=0.85). The hypotheses were tested by multiple regression and covariance analysis. The significance level was set at α=0.05. Results The results show that the subjectively perceived concentration-disturbance by music is influenced by neuroticism (β=0.198; p=0.01). Game-external relevance of soundtracks is influenced by orderliness (β=-0.233; p=0.02). Regression analysis showed that experience with video games affects the perceived impact of music (β=0.220; p=0.001). Results of the regression analyses can be found in table 1. Covariance analysis showed clear main effects of gender (p=0.001) and experience (p=0.002). However there was no significant difference depending on the grade of experience for concentration-disturbance. The interaction of gender and experience was significant (p=0.029) and showed significant results for the scales perceived effect (p=0.044) and game-external relevance of soundtracks (p=0.07) (see table 2).