Use of music streaming platforms for emotion regulation by international students Greg Wadley, Amanda Krause University of Melbourne Parkville 3010, Australia {greg.wadley, amanda.krause} @unimelb.edu.au Jiahui Liang, Zihe Wang University of Melbourne Parkville 3010, Australia {jiahuil7,zihew} @student.unimelb.edu.au Tuck Wah Leong University of Technology, Sydney Ultimo 2007, Australia tuckwah.leong@uts.edu.au ABSTRACT Listening to music has always been an emotion-laden experience. Early research involving analog platforms showed that people use recorded music as a resource to manage their emotions, enhancing desired affective states and limiting unwanted states. More recently, technological advances such as streaming services have made an almost-unlimited selection of music ubiquitously available. This paper examines whether this intensified access to recorded music has afforded new forms of emotion regulation. We studied these practices in international university students, a cohort who face significant stresses and make significant use of digital technology. We found that students actively and routinely use music streaming services to manage their emotional responses to the challenges of studying abroad. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing~Empirical studies in HCI KEYWORDS music listening; emotion regulation; music streaming platforms; international students; ACM Reference format: (LEAVE THIS TEXT AS IS FOR NOW, ACM PROVIDES THE FINAL TEXT) FirstName Surname, FirstName Surname and FirstName Surname. 2018. Insert Your Title Here: Insert Subtitle Here. In Proceedings of ACM Woodstock conference (WOODSTOCK’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. htps://doi.org/10.1145/1234567890 1 Introduction Listening to music has always been an emotion-laden experience. Technological advances such as smartphones and digital streaming services have made an almost-unlimited selection of music ubiquitously available to many people [20]. Prior research has shown that people use music as a resource to manage their emotions (e.g. [22]). More recently, research has begun to examine whether contemporary technology platforms afords new or more intensifed forms of emotion regulation (e.g. [33]). At the same time, research has examined experiences arising from the use of music technologies in daily life (e.g. [25]). Te study reported here contributes to this body of work by examining how people use music streaming platforms to manage afect. We studied the practices of international university students, a cohort who face challenges that have begun to be examined in HCI research [27], [39]. We used a mainly qualitative approach that encouraged study participants to interpret their own experiences. We used this approach because: 1. Music platforms and practices are rapidly evolving, and exploratory studies are appropriate for discovering emerging phenomena ([23] p14); 2. Afective states such as emotions and moods are difcult to defne and measure objectively [6]; 3. Te afective states that people seek to shape by listening to music are not necessarily the emotions typically examined in research [12]. We gathered data “in the wild” in order to capture people’s experiences within the contexts of everyday life and everyday activities [24]. We present evidence that international students make use of music streaming services to manage their afective responses to the challenges of studying abroad. 2 Related work 2.1 Music and mood regulation To function efectively in daily life, to behave appropriately in a social situation, or sometimes simply for hedonic reasons, people ofen seek to modify their afective states: a practice known as emotion regulation [13], [36]. Listening to music can powerfully impact a listener’s emotions, and people ofen use music to shape afective states [16]. Music can distract a listener from a situation, relax them, reduce their stress, focus their thoughts, or help them to think about a situation in a new way [11], [33], [17]. Music can provide energy and motivation, and improve mood and performance during occupational [30] and household [2] tasks. People select music to align moods with activities [18], and choose energetic, rhythmic genres to ∗ Article Title Footnote needs to be captured as Title Note † Author Footnote to be captured as Author Note LEAVE THIS BOX AS IS FOR NOW, ACM PROVIDES THE FINAL TEXT: Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). WOODSTOCK’18, June, 2018, El Paso, Texas USA © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 978-1-4503-0000-0/18/06...$15.00