Music in Mood Regulation Brief scale (B-MMR): Italian version and insights on musical preferences, expertise, and reward experiences

Music psychology has concentrated on how music listening is exploited for mood regulation. The Music in Mood Regulation Brief scale (B-MMR; Saarikallio, 2008) is a well-established measure to assess the types of strategies individuals adopt to regulate mood through music. The current study seeks to verify the psychometric dimensionality and reliability of the B-MMR in an Italian sample (N = 465). Furthermore, relationships of B-MMR with musical expertise, musical preferences, and music reward experiences, as measured by the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), were investigated. Results showed that B-MMR maintained good internal reliability and identical dimensionality in the Italian sample. In addition, musical expertise was found to be associated with a stronger proclivity for the use of music for mood regulation. Furthermore, individuals with broader preferences and a tendency for harmonically and melodically complex music (e.g., classical, opera, and jazz) used music for regulatory purposes to a higher extent than those who favour recent genres (e.g., reggaeton and trap). Lastly, a Bayesian analysis of the psychometric network between B-MMR and BMRQ subcomponents revealed that many B-MMR strategies are linked with emotion evocation. Overall, this study developed an Italian version of the B-MMR and provided greater insights into the nuances related to the use of music for mood regulation.