Abstract
Pre-school aged children who are hospitalized long-term face various challenges during their stay. Feelings of fear and anxiety are common, and they may be going through difficulty adjusting and regulating their emotions. Providing opportunities for pre-school children to practice recovering from a high arousal state can help them gain strategies to improve emotion regulation, modulate their arousal levels to manage hospital related challenges, and cope with their medical treatment.
Music-based interventions and music therapy can be used to target emotion and arousal regulation in children with clinical needs. The Music Recovery Emotion Regulation (MRER) Intervention incorporates active music-making therapeutic experiences that reflect the child's current emotion and arousal level through music. The purpose of this case study was to explore the experience of the MRER intervention on emotion regulation and arousal in a hospitalized pre-school aged child. A secondary purpose was to explore the therapeutic potential of the MRER in the pediatric hospital setting.
One 6-year-old male child, Henry, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia participated in this descriptive intrinsic interpretive case study for eight sessions over the course of a 6-week period. Music experiences included live singing and active music making with instruments. Data collection consisted of the participant’s self-report of his emotions and arousal using a visual analogue scale during each session and rubrics and field notes completed by the student researcher.
Results indicated that Henry had a positive experience with the intervention reporting positively-valenced emotions from beginning to end for 7 out of 8 sessions. He displayed a high level of engagement throughout almost all sessions and demonstrated the ability to transfer the music recovery strategy outside of the music therapy sessions when he needed to recover from a distressed or high arousal state. Findings suggested an immediate, short-term positive impact of the intervention on the arousal level and emotion regulation of the participant.