Interventions for Music Performance Anxiety

Dear Colleagues,

Performing music is one of the most complex tasks related to human performance, incorporating both cognitive and sensorimotor skills. The need for performance excellence exposes musicians to significant physical and psychological stress and injury throughout their education and professional career. Performance anxiety is the most significant psychological issue experienced by performing musicians of any age. This can be significantly detrimental to a performer’s psychological well-being and efforts to achieve optimal performance. Yet, the complete elimination of performance anxiety is neither possible nor desirable, with some degree of anxiety being a natural and desirable feature of optimal performance. Individual differences abound with respect to the characteristics of anxiety, physiologically, cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally. These differences drive the need to consider a nuanced approach that enables musicians achieve their ideal psychological state for performance.

This Special Issue aims to identify psychological interventions that can aid musicians with performance anxiety. The compendium will contain original, theoretically grounded and empirically validated studies of practical, applied approaches that enable musicians to respond to symptoms of anxiety in constructive ways in order to enhance their performance. The scope of these articles and reviews will enrich our understanding of interventions that aim to manage and transform performance anxiety in clinical, educational, and professional settings across the lifespan.

Dr. Margaret S. Osborne
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• performance anxiety
• musicians
• music performance
• treatment
• prevention
• coping strategies
• education
• flow
• peak performance
• musician’s health