If you are lining up to take a penalty kick in a soccer match, you might want to listen to some sad music as this will help you kick the ball accurately amid high tensions. A research team has developed a system to accurately evaluate the ankle-joint angle. This is particularly important for posture control. The team tested the reproducibility of joint angles while participants listened to upbeat, sad, and neutral music. The results demonstrated that the reproducibility error of joint angles was the smallest for sad music, followed by neutral and then upbeat music. The team included Professor Ryoichi Nagatomi and Assistant Professor Janos Negyesi (currently Assistant Professor at the Hungarian University of Sports Science) of the Designing Future Health Initiative; Associate Professor Takeshi Okuyama of the Graduate School of Engineering; and Graduate Student Keqing Yuan of the Graduate School of Medicine at Tohoku University. The study was published in Scientific Reports.
The performance of top athletes, music performers, and skilled crafts workers is supported by precise control of joints throughout the body. Accurate control is acquired through repetitive training. However, even if control is reproduced well during training, mistakes can be made even by experts. These happen in situations of mental tension and fluctuating emotions, such as during actual performance. The regulation of joint angles is the basis of motor control. However, it has not been fully clarified how it is affected by emotion.
The angle of the ankle joint is important for posture control and stability in walking and running. There are two types of ankle joint adjustments: adjusting one ankle joint to the same angle as the other or adjusting one ankle joint to a previously taught angle. There have been no systems for accurately measuring the angle of two ankle joints (ankles).
Meanwhile, psychology studies have found that negative emotions like sadness may help improve performance in fine work and sports. The sensory nervous system is important for motor control. It transmits information about the state of joints and muscles (proprioception) to the central nervous system. Previous studies have used microneurograms to record direct neural activity. These studies reported that the activity of intrinsic sensory nerve fibers is more stable when participants listen to sad music and unstable when they listen to upbeat music.
The research group developed a system to accurately measure the angles of both ankle joints. Later, they asked each participant to select pieces of music from previous research and a corpus of classical music (13 sad, 9 upbeat, and 5 neutral pieces). Participants selected what they felt was the saddest, most upbeat, and most neutral piece. The team then performed joint-position perception tests while the participants listened to each selected piece.
The ankle-position perception test involved participants taking a long sitting position with their knees bent. Both ankles were fixed to a joint-angle measuring device. While blindfolded, the participants held their ankles fully extended, and the measurer moved their feet to present four angles: 83°, 90°, 97°, and 104°. Test 1 involved the task of reproducing each of the ankle-joint angles, in no particular order. In Test 2, the contralateral foot was fixed at one of the angles and the foot to be tested was matched to the same angle as the other foot. Four joint angle reproductions were performed six times in Test 1 and Test 2 for each of four conditions: upbeat music, sad music, neutral music, and no music.
The team found that joint-angle reproduction errors were smaller in the order of sad, neutral, and upbeat music. Having fun is an important motivator and stimulus for exercising. However, this study confirms that it is important to remain calm when performing exercises that require precise movements. To use this finding in sports, music performance and work, it is necessary to clarify the central mechanism of how each emotion affects the motor program. The research group will continue to elucidate the central mechanisms of emotion and motor control and promote the use of research findings in the field.
Journal Information
Publication: Scientific Reports
Title: The influence of emotional states induced by emotion-related auditory stimulus on ankle proprioception performance in healthy individuals
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-87590-8
This article has been translated by JST with permission from The Science News Ltd. (https://sci-news.co.jp/). Unauthorized reproduction of the article and photographs is prohibited.