Music to their ears | Newswise

Are people with attention deficit disorder with or without hyperactivity (ADHD) more likely to listen to background music while performing daily tasks?

Kelly-Ann Lachance, a doctoral student in clinical neuropsychology at Université de Montréal, decided to find out.

She and her supervisor, neuropsychologist and psychology professor Nathalie Gosselin, analyzed the responses of 434 young adults between the ages of 17 and 30 to an online survey about music listening habits.

“In lab studies, we rarely ask about listening habits, and yet it’s important because people differ in the amount of stimulation they need to perform a task optimally,” said Lachance.

The results were published in Frontiers in Psychology in January 2025. Lachance said she chose to publish in an open-access journal because she wanted to share her findings with a broader audience.

“As a future clinician, I want to use research to help the individuals I follow,” she said.

Detailed online questionnaire

Launched at the end of the pandemic, the study relied entirely on data collected through the survey.

“Some parts of it already existed, so we took the questions on music-listening habits and the subjective effects of background music and put them in an online questionnaire that could be completed in under 15 minutes,” explained Lachance.

To determine whether respondents were ADHD or neurotypical, the survey included questions from the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale for DSM-5 (ASRS-5); 118 of the respondents screened as ADHD and 316 as neurotypical.

“The ASRS-5 is a quick way to assess ADHD symptoms,” Lachance noted.

Other questions in the survey assessed each respondent’s recent emotional state, level of anxiety and depressive symptoms.

“Music is used to modulate emotions, so we wanted to include emotional functioning in the study,” explained Gosselin, who is also director of UdeM’s Music, Emotions and Cognition Research Laboratory (MUSEC Laboratory) and a researcher at its parent organization, BRAMS (International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research).

Playing sports or studying

The study examined differences in background music listening during a host of daily tasks, including cognitive activities such as reading, writing and studying, and less cognitive activities such as cooking, taking public transport and playing sports.

It found that people with ADHD reported listening to background music while playing sports and while studying significantly more than did neurotypicals.

However, neurotypicals spent more hours per week listening to music while not doing anything else.

While the researchers weren’t completely surprised by the results, they didn’t see them as a foregone conclusion.

“You could also imagine that music might interfere with performing a cognitively demanding task,” which could have made individuals with ADHD less inclined to listen to music at the same time, said Gosselin.

In fact, not only do young adults with ADHD like to have music in the background while studying, they prefer music that is stimulating rather than relaxing.

“Why stimulating music? The literature shows that people with ADHD need more activation to perform at the same optimal level as neurotypicals. Music could help with this, regardless of the type of activity,” explained Lachance.

“However, this is a hypothesis that requires future testing,” Gosselin pointed out.

A beneficial habit?

Is music in fact beneficial for young adults with ADHD? How does it affect their concentration and motivation? Gosselin has been wondering about this for a long time.

“My first neuropsychology internship was in child psychiatry,” she recalled. “In one of my first cases, a father asked me if it was a good idea for his teen with attention difficulties to listen to music while studying. I didn’t know what to say because there were no conclusive data in the literature. But the question stayed with me.”

Since music is ubiquitous and readily available, it could be valuable in helping people manage ADHD symptoms.

“I’m not suggesting it could replace medication, but it could complement it,” said Lachance. “The question is how we can use the full potential of music to promote optimal performance.”