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Contributing Factors is the second of the two broad scoring categories in the MPADQ, and it explores the territory beneath the surface of your performance anxiety. While Symptomatology describes how anxiety shows up, Contributing Factors examines why it may be present and what personal, psychological, relational, and situational forces are feeding it. These 21 sub-categories span an unusually wide range — from your teacher relationship and your self-concept as a musician, to your romantic relationships, spiritual life, personality tendencies, and feelings about auditions. No two musicians will have the same contributing factor profile, and that uniqueness is exactly what the MPADQ is designed to surface.
Not all 21 contributing factors will be highly relevant to every musician. Some sub-categories — such as Romantic Relationships or the Audition Factor — may simply not apply to your current situation, in which case N/A responses are appropriate and those sub-categories will be excluded from your broad score. Focus your energy on the factors where your scores are lowest, as those represent the clearest opportunities for growth.

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How Contributing Factors Is Scored

The Contributing Factors broad category score is the rounded average of all 21 sub-category scores, excluding any that received an N/A result. Each sub-category score is the rounded average of all non-N/A Likert responses for questions assigned to that sub-category, expressed as a percentage (0%–100%). A lower score in a sub-category indicates that factor is more prominently influencing your anxiety; a higher score indicates a relative area of strength or low concern.

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The 21 Contributing Factor Sub-Categories

The relationship between a musician and their primary instructor is one of the most significant — and most intimate — professional relationships in a performer’s life. Questions in this sub-category probe the quality of trust, mutual understanding, belief, and comfort in that relationship. A teacher who understands your musical goals, believes in your ability, and creates a safe studio environment can be a powerful buffer against performance anxiety. A strained or misaligned teacher relationship, conversely, can amplify self-doubt and hesitation. This sub-category also captures whether your teacher understands your performance anxiety specifically.Low scores suggest: Reviewing book chapters on how to navigate and improve the teacher-student dynamic, communicate about anxiety, and build a more supportive instructional relationship.
Feeling genuinely welcome and at home in your musical community — your school, conservatory, ensemble, or professional circle — has a direct bearing on how safe it feels to perform. When you feel like you belong, performing in front of peers becomes a shared experience. When you feel like an outsider, every performance can feel like an audition for your right to be there. This sub-category measures your sense of fitting in with your teacher’s studio, your institution, and your musical colleagues.Low scores suggest: Prioritizing chapters that address community, identity, and belonging in musical life, and how to cultivate a stronger internal sense of legitimacy independent of external validation.
Performance anxiety does not exist in isolation — it is embedded within a broader stress and anxiety landscape. Musicians who carry a high baseline level of generalized anxiety or chronic stress are more likely to experience performance anxiety because their nervous systems are already working harder. This sub-category measures how anxious and stressed you are as a general rule, how well you manage that stress, and whether you are good at setting healthy boundaries on your time and commitments.Low scores suggest: Consulting chapters on stress management fundamentals, boundary-setting, relaxation strategies, and the connection between general wellbeing and performance confidence.
Perfectionism is one of the most frequently cited contributors to performance anxiety among musicians. A perfectionist mindset demands flawless execution and treats mistakes as evidence of personal inadequacy rather than as a normal part of learning and performing. This sub-category measures both self-identified perfectionism and the degree of self-criticism you apply in lessons and in your practice room.Low scores suggest: Engaging with the book’s chapters on perfectionism, self-compassion, healthy standards versus toxic standards, and the psychological cost of treating performances as pass/fail evaluations.
How you see yourself as a performer — your confidence in your own technical and expressive abilities — is a powerful predictor of performance anxiety. This sub-category measures your belief in yourself as a singer or instrumentalist, your sense of yourself as a natural performer, and whether that self-belief has been consistent across your life. It also captures how others (teacher, family, peers) perceive your performing ability.Low scores suggest: Working through chapters on building performance confidence, developing a resilient performer identity, and separating your sense of self-worth from the outcome of any single performance.
General self-esteem — how you feel about yourself as a person, not just as a musician — plays a foundational role in performance anxiety. Low self-esteem can make the vulnerability of performing feel disproportionately threatening, because a poor performance seems to confirm negative beliefs already held about oneself. This sub-category measures whether you are sometimes or often down or depressed, whether you like yourself as a person, and your sense of your own physical appearance and general worthiness.Low scores suggest: Chapters addressing the relationship between self-esteem and musical identity, and strategies for building a more stable, internalized sense of self-worth.
How much weight you place on the long-term consequences of any given performance shapes how threatening that performance feels. This sub-category examines beliefs about the importance and scarcity of music careers, how much performing music is prioritized in your life, feelings of control or lack of control over your musical future, and whether you fear the future or fear success. Musicians who perceive every performance as a high-stakes career-defining moment tend to experience higher anxiety than those with a more expansive, flexible view of their future.Low scores suggest: Consulting chapters on perspective, long-term thinking, career resilience, and releasing the grip of catastrophic thinking about musical futures.
A strong support network — family, friends, and meaningful activities outside of music — acts as a psychological cushion against performance anxiety. When music is the only thing in a musician’s life, the stakes of every performance become enormous. This sub-category measures the quality of family and friendship relationships, whether loved ones are actively supportive of your musical pursuits, and whether you have a rich life outside of practicing and performing.Low scores suggest: Book chapters on building and maintaining supportive relationships, communicating your needs to loved ones, and cultivating a multidimensional identity that doesn’t hinge entirely on musical success.
Romantic relationships can be a profound source of support or a significant source of stress for performers. This sub-category is one of the most detailed in the questionnaire, measuring whether your partner believes in your ability, understands your musical goals, understands your performance anxiety, and actively supports your performances — or whether the relationship creates friction, indifference, or even unintentional sabotage of your musical goals.Low scores suggest: If this factor is prominent, the book’s chapters on relationships, communication, and the intersection of intimate partnerships and musical life will be particularly relevant. Note that N/A responses are appropriate if you are not currently in a romantic relationship.
The physical body is the instrument through which all musical performance flows. Diet, sleep, exercise, hydration, and overall physical health are not peripheral concerns — they directly affect the nervous system’s capacity to manage stress, regulate emotion, and sustain focused performance. This sub-category measures the quality and consistency of your physical health habits.Low scores suggest: Prioritizing the book’s chapters on physical wellness as a foundation for performance confidence, including sleep hygiene, nutrition, hydration, and exercise as components of a holistic preparation practice.
For many musicians, spiritual or religious beliefs and practices provide a framework of meaning, community, and equanimity that supports performance. Beliefs such as “things happen for a reason” or “a higher power is looking out for me” can reduce the felt stakes of any single performance. Regular religious practice can also provide community, ritual, and a source of comfort separate from musical life. This sub-category is entirely optional — N/A is appropriate if these questions do not apply to you.Low scores suggest: Chapters exploring meaning-making, purpose, and the psychological value of having a stable worldview or belief system that extends beyond musical achievement.
Performances are inherently uncertain. Unexpected events — a memory slip, a missed cue, an unresponsive audience — are part of performing live. How comfortable you are with that uncertainty, and how much you need to feel in control, significantly shapes your anxiety response. This sub-category measures your relationship with control: whether you feel you have too little of it, whether you are uncomfortable without it, and whether you believe you can influence the course of your musical life.Low scores suggest: Chapters on acceptance, managing uncertainty, flexible thinking, and shifting from a control-based approach to performance toward a trust-based one.
Closely related to feelings of control, this sub-category examines whether you have a competitive or controlling personality type and how that tendency interacts with musical performance. A highly competitive orientation can increase performance anxiety because every performance becomes a contest — with an audience, with peers, or with an internalized ideal standard. This sub-category measures your competitiveness both by nature and by musical circumstance, as well as how much you enjoy challenges and competitions.Low scores suggest: Book chapters on reframing competition, channeling competitive drive in healthy directions, and approaching performance as an act of sharing rather than an act of winning.
How you think about your own anxiety — your meta-level beliefs about whether you are an anxious person and whether your anxiety is manageable — powerfully shapes your experience of it. This sub-category measures whether you have personally experienced performance anxiety (currently and in the recent past), whether you used to experience it but no longer do, whether you have a plan for combating it, and whether nervousness is negatively affecting your musical progress. Importantly, it captures how much anxiety has become part of your self-narrative.Low scores suggest: Chapters on the psychology of performance anxiety, changing your relationship with anxiety, developing a concrete pre-performance plan, and building coping methods that work for you specifically.
The ability to maintain focused attention during practice and performance is one of the most trainable — and most anxiety-sensitive — skills in a musician’s toolkit. This sub-category measures how easily you are distracted, how well you sustain focus while singing or playing, practicing, and performing, and whether you are able to quiet mental chatter. It also captures whether focus loss under pressure is an identified struggle for you.Low scores suggest: Chapters dedicated to attentional control, concentration strategies, mindfulness applications in performance, and the skill of redirecting focus when it drifts.
Your sense of how well-prepared you are — and whether your preparation actually translates into consistent performance quality — is a key mediator of performance anxiety. This sub-category measures whether you consider yourself a good musician, whether you learn and memorize music easily, whether your quality as a performer is consistent, and whether you have strong pitch abilities. A strong self-concept of preparation and musicianship reduces the sense of vulnerability in performance; a weak one amplifies it.Low scores suggest: Chapters on effective practice strategies, memory training, consistency building, and the psychological relationship between preparation confidence and performance freedom.
How you handle disagreement, tension, and conflict — in your musical relationships and in your daily life — shapes the emotional climate in which you perform. Musicians who avoid conflict may accumulate unresolved tensions with teachers, colleagues, or partners that quietly amplify anxiety. This sub-category measures whether you deal well with conflicts and whether you are a non-confrontational person.Low scores suggest: Chapters addressing interpersonal dynamics in musical life, assertive communication, and how unresolved relational conflicts can leak into performance anxiety.
Introversion — a preference for inner-directed experience and a tendency to find social situations more taxing than extroverts do — is associated with heightened performance anxiety for many musicians. Performing is inherently social and outward-directed, which can feel at odds with an introverted nature. This sub-category measures where you fall on the introversion-extroversion spectrum, which provides important context for understanding the social and relational dimensions of your anxiety.Low scores suggest (high introversion indicated): Chapters that address introversion as a personality trait, performance as a form of expression that can be deeply compatible with an introverted nature, and specific strategies for introverted performers to draw on their strengths.
A tendency toward negative thinking — pessimism, expecting the worst, believing that preparation will be undone by inevitable failure — is a significant amplifier of performance anxiety. This sub-category measures how often you think negatively, whether you consider yourself a positive thinker, and whether you hold the belief that something always goes wrong no matter how much you prepare.Low scores suggest: Chapters on cognitive reframing, building an optimistic explanatory style, challenging catastrophic beliefs, and the practical neuroscience of positive expectation and performance.
The motivation to perform and the internal drive to do your best are protective factors against performance anxiety in many respects — they keep preparation strong, they connect performance to intrinsic meaning, and they support resilience after setbacks. This sub-category measures your sense of drive, your ability to start and sustain projects with energy, your mental toughness for musical and performance demands, and your overall motivation to succeed.Low scores suggest: Chapters on motivation, purpose, mental toughness training, and how to reconnect with the intrinsic joy of music-making when anxiety or burnout have eroded your drive.
Auditions are a uniquely pressurized performance context that many musicians find significantly more anxiety-provoking than ordinary performances. The competitive, evaluative, and often high-stakes nature of auditions can transform what is otherwise a manageable performance into a source of acute dread. This sub-category measures whether you prefer performances to auditions, how nervous auditions make you, and whether you have a generalized tendency toward anxiety about auditions specifically. Some questions in this sub-category overlap with the Self-Concept of Anxiety sub-category, reflecting the deep connection between audition fear and overall performance anxiety self-concept.Low scores suggest: Chapters dedicated to audition preparation, managing audition-specific anxiety, the psychology of evaluation, and strategies for performing your best when the stakes feel highest.

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Reading Your Broad Contributing Factors Score

Your overall Contributing Factors broad category score is the rounded average of all 21 sub-category scores (excluding any that scored N/A). Because these 21 factors cover such diverse terrain — from personality and relationships to health habits and spiritual life — individual sub-category scores are far more actionable than the broad average alone. Pay close attention to the sub-categories where your scores are lowest, as those are the contributing factors most actively shaping your performance anxiety.
A low score in a contributing factor sub-category is not a verdict — it is information. It indicates an area where targeted attention, whether through the book’s chapters, personal reflection, or work with a teacher or counselor, is most likely to yield meaningful change in your anxiety experience.

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Next Steps

Score Overview

Review the full scoring methodology and see how all 24 sub-categories and 2 broad categories fit together.

Symptomatology

Explore your Physical, Cognitive, and Behavioral symptom scores to understand how your anxiety manifests.

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