Page 93 - How to Shine on Stage

Emotion regulation has three components:

1. the beginning of actions that trigger emotions
2. the suppression of actions that trigger emotions
3. the modulation of reactions triggered by emotions

Ideally, the third component is the best way to make the most of the
regulatory processes (Gross, 1998).
As I mentioned in the previous section, a musician often has an am- 91
bivalent emotional attitude towards performing: they look forward to it
and feel positive excitement, yet fear possible inability to display their
mastery, as well as the opinions of the audience, etc. These two main
emotions are joined by a number of others which the performer may be
able to access consciously, but there exist even more which unconscious-
ly colour the performance experience and guide the quality of the per-
formance. Once the performer recognizes the emotions overwhelming
them prior to walking on stage, the second important step is for them to
learn to adapt the present emotions to the performance setting in order
to optimize their performance. I will discuss this in more detail in the
next section as part of the introduction of the IZOF model, which is a Direct Factors of Musical Performance Success
model of the individual zone of optimal performance, developed by Ha-
nin (2003; 2007) in the context of sport psychology, but is also applicable
in psychology of musical performance. Presently, however, we shall focus
on the main guidelines for emotion regulation.
Music performance research studies that focus on cognitive pro-
cesses in expert musicians have received considerable attention (e.g. Ev-
ans & McPherson, 2017; López-Íñiguez & McPherson, 2020; Woody &
McPherson, 2010). In recent years, however, it has become increasingly
acknowledged that the key drivers of learning and achievement are emo-
tions (e.g. Keefer et al., 2018; Pekrun, 2014). This has generated a grow-
ing number of studies on the emotion regulation in the academic context
(Ben-Eliyahu, 2019), including the discipline of music.
Both situational demands and individual characteristics influence
how one regulates one’s emotions when engaging in challenging ac-
tivities (Kobylińska & Kusev, 2019). The situational norms and the
socio-cultural context of the implementation of an activity shape the
kinds of strategies one will use to regulate one’s emotions. It is par-
ticularly interesting to discern the strategies we use when we want
to proactively regulate or control our emotions in challenging situa-
tions (Kobylińska & Kusev, 2019), which is often the case in musical
performance.