Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Psychology (Ph.D.)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Raymond DiGiuseppe

Second Advisor

Mark Terjesen

Third Advisor

Melissa Peckins

Abstract

A popular type of media that Americans consume across ages is music. Today’s youth and adults can easily search for and listen to music. Given the increased availability of streaming music and its potential impact on people’s emotional states, this study examined the irrationality of contemporary musical lyrics. The sample consisted of the most frequently streamed songs from the years 2006-2022. A total of 1700 “Hot 100” songs from Billboard.com were collected and analyzed for Irrational Belief (IB) concepts. Genre-specific data was collected from Billboard’s “Year End Charts” for Country (n=1197), R&B/Hip Hop (n=1223), and Alternative (n=656) music for a total of 3076 genre-specific songs. All 4776 songs were analyzed for total irrational belief score content using modern REBT definitions. Results revealed that all genres contained irrational belief language each year from 2006(7)-2019. The genre with the highest degree of irrationality was R&B/Hip music, not Country music, as predicted. There was no significant correlation between the frequency of music played, as represented by ordinal song ranking, and irrational belief concepts. Findings failed to support a significant correlation between the presence of irrational beliefs in popular music, specifically the average number of IB concepts per song in the “Hot 100,” and suicide completion in children, adolescents, and young adults and drug overdose deaths across the lifespan. However, there was a significant correlation between the Frustration Intolerance total score in the “Hot 100” songs and suicide completion/substance drug overdose statistics from 2006-2016(8) for select age groupings. There was also a significant difference between the average number of irrational concepts per song in the overall “Hot 100,” but the opposite of what was predicted was supported, with there being more irrational concepts present in the years prior to the pandemic (2017-2019), not during the pandemic years (2020-2022). These results add to the REBT research on music and have important implications for how clinicians, parents, and educators conceptualize music.

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