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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder with lifetime prevalence of 7.8%, is characterized by symptoms that develop following exposure to traumatic life events and that cause an immediate experience of intense fear, helplessness or horror. PTSD is marked by recurrent nightmares typified by the recall of intrusive experiences and by extended disturbance throughout sleep. Individuals with PTSD respond poorly to drug treatments for insomnia. The disadvantages of drug treatment for insomnia underline the importance of non-pharmacological alternatives. Thus, the present study had three aims: first, to compare the efficiency of two relaxation techniques (muscular relaxation and progressive music relaxation) in alleviating insomnia among individuals with PTSD using both objective and subjective measures of sleep quality; second, to examine whether these two techniques have different effects on psychological indicators of PTSD, such as depression and anxiety; and finally, to examine how initial PTSD symptom severity and baseline emotional measures are related to the efficiency of these two relaxation methods. Thirteen PTSD patients with no other major psychiatric or neurological disorders participated in the study. The study comprised one seven-day running-in, no-treatment period, followed by two seven-day experimental periods. The treatments constituted either music relaxation or muscle relaxation techniques at desired bedtime. These treatments were randomly assigned. During each of these three experimental periods, subjects' sleep was continuously monitored with a wrist actigraph (Ambulatory Monitoring, Inc.), and subjects were asked to fill out several questionnaires concerned with a wide spectrum of issues, such as sleep, depression, and anxiety. Analyses revealed a significant increase in objective and subjective sleep efficiency and a significant reduction in depression level following music relaxation. Moreover, following music relaxation, a highly significant negative correlation was found between improvement in objective sleep efficiency and reduction in depression scale. The study‘s findings provide evidence that music relaxation at bedtime can be used as treatment for insomnia among individuals with PTSD.

This study investigated the impact of music on customers, persons waiting for surgery patients, in a hospital’s surgery waiting room; an inherently stressful environment. These persons are customers of the hospital in that they are using the hospital’s services, are typically involved in the decision to use the hospital for the patient’s surgery, and are often responsible for financial payments. In self‐reports from persons using the waiting room, the use of music was related to decreased stress and increased relaxation in comparison to times when no music was utilized. This improved mood state was not, however, correlated with better evaluations by these individuals of the quality of the hospital’s services or of improved perceptions that the hospital was meeting expectations concerning its overall service delivery. These findings contribute to the ongoing research concerning the role of atmospherics or ambience of a service system in customers’ quality/satisfaction evaluations.

The purpose of this article is to review apps that will enable librarians to take back control of their own mental space and hopefully provide some means to relaxation. Sometimes it is hard to find a soothing space amidst the chaos of the outside world. Our library users turn to the author to provide these spaces in their own lives, but paradoxically, today’s librarian may find little relaxation within their own library’s walls.

The author tests and reviews apps designed to help librarians relax.

The author reviews various different apps designed to help librarians relax.

The apps reviewed here will enable librarians to take back control of their own mental space and hopefully, provide some means to relaxation.

This article describes how the author incorporated accelerated training techniques into weekly staff meetings, which speeded up staff training, made the training more effective, and improved morale. Before incorporating these techniques, the author found it difficult to get staff to come to the weekly team meetings, and found it hard to keep their attention. After the change the meetings became enjoyable and productive. Based on research on accelerated training, the author designed a new model for weekly training meetings that met diverse learning styles, engaged the learners’ whole brain, learning styles, methods of reception and intelligences. The model made training exciting, fun and engaging; and appealed to learners’ preferred styles of reception, organization and expression.

Academic studies have sought to understand the motivations of festival and event attendees usually through single-event case studies. This approach has failed to generate a generalizable set of motivation items. In addition, there is increasing criticism in the literature of the common methodological framework used in festival motivation studies, due to a perceived over-reliance on motivations derived from the broader tourism and travel research, with too little attention to event-specific factors. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by analyzing a sub-category of motivation studies, music festivals, in order to see if this approach can elicit a consistent set of motivation dimensions for the sub-category, which can in turn be compared and contrasted with the broader literature. A new case study of motivations to attend the 28th Macau International Music Festival (MIMF) is included to complement the existing music festival sub-category by adding a classical music and music festivals in Asia.

Motivation dimensions important to music festivals are compared to dimensions across the broader festival motivation literature to find similarities and differences. Factor analysis is used to identify the motivation dimensions of attendees at the MIMF and the results are compared to those of existing music festival studies.

Music festival goers are shown to be primarily motivated by the core festival offering, the music, in contrast to festival attendees in general, where socialization has emerged as the primary motivating element. The results of the additional case study support these findings.

In contrast to previous research, this study examines the possibility of identifying common motivations among festival attendees through studying festivals by sub-categories.