Yes, this is clearly your problem - you simply don't understand how musical pitch works, or you wouldn't ask that question at all. Firstly, the effects of frequency in sound are logarithmic, not linear - you aren't just 'taking off 8Hz' across the board - that would make no difference at high frequencies, and a massive difference at low ones. We are talking about pitch here, not frequency. So, those settings would only translate to 432Hz if the original pitch was A=440, and only for that note. - But this only applies to music pitched at A=440 And there's a lot of music that already isn't at that pitch.
And incidentally, the way I've written this is correct - A=440Hz. That's the A below middle C on a piano. The A an octave below that is A=220Hz (half the frequency, but an octave in pitch) For A=432, the A below would equal A=216. You will now notice that there is a difference of only 4Hz between the notes, whereas there's 8Hz difference the octave above. If you play the A above, then the frequency differences double - A=880 becomes A=864, and there's a 16Hz difference. That's the effect of a logarithmic change.
The one thing you will find about the research, though (otherwise it would have been shot down from the outset) was that all researchers will have checked very carefully what the pitch of the original music was before pitch-shifting it to A=432Hz. If you don't do this on an individual basis with each piece, then you will not be achieving whatever it was they claimed, and you will, as far as I'm concerned, have justified your thought that this might be a placebo effect...
And you should bear in mind that as somebody with a Master's in acoustic science, I might just know what I'm talking about. What I was referring to as a crock of .... was the idea that you can do pitch changing on a blanket basis - you really can't! As for how pitch got standardised at A=440, that has nothing to do with Rockefellers at all. It originated from Johann Heinrich Scheibler in Germany, who recommended A440 as a standard in 1834, although I think that he got the idea from the French, who'd been using it earlier than that. Anyway, it was adopted by the German Natural History Society the same year, but not implemented in the US until 1926, and then only informally. In many practical ways, it was a good idea, as pitch had been wandering around all over the place for a long time and having it standardised had all the same advantages as any other standard does for the bulk of users. In many ways it was an arbitrary decision as to what the number was - it was more important that it was fixed.
I can't say that I'm surprised that lowering pitch slightly has the effect of calming people a bit. But - and it's a big but - one of the significant problems with most of the research I've seen into this is that they've only tested these effects at one alternative pitch, so as it stands, none of this so far can be conclusive.
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