Many Penn State students pay meticulous attention to playlists for an upcoming party, but with finals approaching, some may neglect the importance of paying similar attention to their choice of music in between study sessions.

In fact, the best cure for studying over the next week could be blasting some jams, head banging and a good dose of mosh pits.

Dan Yemin may be better known as an influential punk rocker and current lead singer of Philly-based band Paint it Black, but, given his day job as a clinical psychologist and experience with punk music, he may also be able to offer advice on how to use music to deal with finals stress.

"I can speak from my own experience as a punk. I was alienated and pissed about a lot of things," Yemin said, adding that punk music was a relief in the "politically conservative" town he grew up in. "I think that music is all about emotional release and emotional expression; it's all about building bridges between people."

Though he has many clinical psychology techniques for aiding his patients, one tool Yemin sometimes uses is music. If he finds it appropriate, Yemin will ask a patient about his or her musical tastes, and he may lend out some music that he thinks will be cathartic and offer relief.

"I pay attention to what the people I work with listen to," he said. "I definitely have clients that are punks, but people can find it in hip hop, and they can find it in all sorts of things."

Valerie Stratton, an associate professor of psychology at Penn State Altoona, has been researching the impact of music on emotions and moods for the past 25 years.

Stratton also emphasized that music's effect on a person's attitude is all about personal preferences.

"Music can have very definite impact on moods," she said. "We did find that it often is more the meaning of the music than any style, per se. If you happen to like heavy metal, then that's what you need to listen to in order to relax."

Music therapy can help patients do more than relax, said Sarah Biedka, a freshman at Elizabethtown College majoring in music therapy.

Biedka has worked in an Elizabethtown clinic with patients ranging from otherwise healthy students stressed out from finals to a girl diagnosed with cerebral palsy. To help the girl with cerebral palsy, Biedka and the girl waved scarves to different rhythms to help the girl improve her range of motion.

"[Music therapy] is not just emotional and psychological, it's almost like physical therapy of music, too," she said.

Biedka also said that Beethoven's music, if played at certain decibels, can help nerve regeneration.

While listening to music can help with physical or mental health, musically inclined students may also find creating music to be therapeutic. Yemin offered an example of how music-making can help in stressful times.

After he suffered a stroke in 2001 at age 32, Yemin went through some intense introspection. His band before Paint it Black, Kid Dynamite, had recently broken up, and Yemin hadn't been making music for a while. After some soul-searching, he went back to his craft.

"I think [the stroke] is the reason I'm still doing music. I'm lucky I had no permanent damage," he said. "I really started to scrutinize what my life was about and I realized that it was kind of insane that I wasn't doing music."