Research Note. Philosophical Worldview Determines Attitudes toward Using Background Music before,during,and after Counselling

Abstract

The present study examined the degree to which counsellors' philosophical worldviews affect their attitudes toward using background music and natural sounds before, during, and after counselling. Seventy-two counsellors (35 male, 37 female) rated excerpts of five musical selections and recordings of birdsongs and a waterfall on perceived usefulness as background music/sound before, during, or after a counselling session and indicated their likelihood of using each selection. Factor-analytically derived scales from the ratings correlated positively with scores from the Organicism-Mechanism Paradigm Inventory (OMPI; Johnson et al., 1988), indicating that organismically inclined counsellors are more likely to use background music/sounds in their practice than are mechanistically inclined counsellors.

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