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Citation Zenobi, D., Juncos, D., Roman, J., & Osborne, M.S. (2023, 4 June). The Musician’s Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (MAAQ): A New Tool for Measuring Psychological Flexibility as it relates to Music Performance Anxiety in Student and Professional Singers. Paper presented at The Voice Foundation’s 52nd Annual Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, 31 May – 4 June, 2023, Philadelphia, PA, USA. doi: 10.26188/23620695 Abstract Singers in all genres, and at all levels of study struggle with Music Performance Anxiety (MPA). MPA can manifest behaviorally as avoidance of auditions and other high-stakes performances, avoidance of practice, the inability to experience flow while practicing/performing, and it also correlates with maladaptive perfectionism. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a mindfulness and acceptance-based intervention, teaches that if singers remain “psychologically flexible” in the presence of MPA, we may cope with it more effectively. These findings are relevant to voice professionals because ACT coaching can ethically be administered within the lesson by voice teachers/vocal coaches to help singers cope better with MPA and related challenges. This study is the first to measure levels of psychological flexibility in both student and professional musicians. It tested a new musician-specific questionnaire, the Musician’s Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (MAAQ), adapted from the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire - Version II (AAQ-II). Students were recruited from an Australian conservatory and a School of Music within a private liberal arts university in the Midwestern United States. Professional participants included an international sample of musicians in all genres/instruments. Participants filled out the AAQII, the MAAQ, the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS), the revised Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory (KMPAI-R), short measures of flow within performance and practice (SDFS-2), and they answered questions about their performance and practice-related behaviors. The MAAQ was successfully constructed and showed good reliability and invariance of its factor structure and good convergent/divergent validity with established questionnaires. It outperformed the AAQ-II as a predictor of important outcomes in music performance and practice. In the student samples, the MAAQ better predicted avoidant behavior in one’s practice and in performances, flow states in practice and performances, and grades on a recent, adjudicated music exam. In the professional sample, the MAAQ better predicted performance-related avoidance and whether one competes in professional music competitions after completing their education. Despite the small samples, these results offer preliminary support for the MAAQ’s utility in measuring and predicting problematic behaviors associated with MPA.

CITATION Juncos, D.G., Roman, J. B., Zenobi, D. & Osborne, M.S. (2022, 14-19 June). Assessing Psychological Flexibility with the Musician's Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (MAAQ). Poster presented at the Association for Contextual Behavior Science World Conference 2022, San Francisco, contextualscience.org/wc2022. https://doi.org/ 10.26188/20280318 ABSTRACT Performance anxiety, low motivation to practice, psychological distress, perfectionism, and having to endure adjudicated exams/auditions, are some of many stressors facing university musicians across the world. Existing research suggests that remaining psychologically flexible might enable students to cope more effectively with these challenges (Juncos et al., 2017). However, no specific measures of psychological flexibility (PF) exist for them yet, aside from general PF measures, i.e., AAQ-II (Bond et al., 2011). This study aimed to validate a self-report measure of PF for student musicians (Musician’s Acceptance and Action Questionnaire), and to determine its ability to predict outcomes of interest within their performances and practice, in particular, scores on an adjudicated music exam, avoidance of performances/practice, and a history of psychotherapy/medication due to music performance, e.g., treating performance anxiety. Two samples of university musicians were recruited from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (Nf64) and Butler University (Nf64). Students completed a pilot version of the MAAQ, along with measures of PF, music performance anxiety, perfectionism and flow. Demographic information about their training experiences were collected, and they were asked about a history of avoidance within their performances and practice. Results of analyses to determine the MAAQ's factor structure, internal consistency, and construct/discriminant validity will be reported. Also, the results of analyses to determine its incremental predictive validity when compared to the AAQ-II in predicting outcomes of interest for university musicians will be reported. The MAAQ's psychometric properties and overall ability to measure PF within music performance and practice settings will be discussed.

This study shows that psychological inflexibility is a significant predictor of music performance anxiety, which might decrease flow experiences during music performance. Performance anxiety and perfectionism also contributed to avoidance of weekly practice.