The Psychology of Disliked Music

There is growing interest in the psychological and emotional benefits of listening to music. Studies show that listening to music can improve mood, reduce pain, and serve as a coping mechanism for a variety of emotional stressors.

However, much less is known about how music can sometimes cause aversive reactions in listeners. We all have music that we dislike, but what effects does listening to disliked music actually have? And do these effects vary across individuals?

The Psychology of Disliked Music

New research by Jonna Vuoskoski and Henna-Riika Peltola, published in this month's issue of Psychology of Music, released a new psychological scale of musical aversion called the Aversive Musical Experience Scale (AMES). The scale was developed by asking 102 Finnish participants to write openly about their experience of listening to aversive music.

The researchers examined the responses and used a series of factor analyses to derive 18 unique items that make up the scale. The 18 items include statements about sensations (e.g. "I experience unpleasant bodily sensations when I hear aversive music"), statements about social factors ("When I meet people who like music that I find aversive, I start to think negatively about them"), and statements about features ("A singer’s annoying voice makes the music sound aversive to me"). Each item could be responded to on a 1-5 scale.

To examine the validity and reliability of the scale, the researchers presented the AMES scale to 354 Finnish and British participants, asking them to respond to each of the 18 items on a 1-5 Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = somewhat disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = somewhat agree, and 5 = strongly agree). In addition, participants completed several other scales assessing demographics, personality traits, and experiences of misophonia (a strong aversive reaction to certain sounds and their contexts) and ASMR (the autonomous sensory meridian response). The researchers were interested in knowing whether personality traits or other sound-related sensitivities might predict the degree of music-evoked aversion.

They initially found that women scored higher than men on the overall AMES scale as well as two subscales (sensations and features), suggesting that women, on average, tend to experience more intense aversive musical experiences than men. However, subsequent analyses showed that this gender difference was eliminated once researchers controlled for factors such as misophonia and emotional contagion. They also found that age was a significant predictor of AMES scores, suggesting that music-induced aversive experiences become more intense as people get older.

Experiences of ASMR were not related to AMES scores. However, experiences of misophonia were highly predictive of AMES scores. Participants' scores on the Misophonia Questionnaire (MQ; Wu et al., 2014) had a correlation of r = 0.54 with their overall AMES scores and were also positively correlated with the subscales of AMES. In other words, people with misophonia likely have sound sensitivities that go beyond the typical misophonic trigger sound categories (like other people chewing or sniffling), also extending to disliked music.

It is important to note that this study was conducted as an online survey, asking participants to respond retrospectively about their experiences with disliked music. The researchers point out that further work needs to examine whether these retrospective accounts match up with actual reactions while listening to disliked music.

Overall, this research highlights that the effects of music on cognition and emotions depend critically on the music. Liked music can have positive effects across a number of measures, but disliked music can similarly lead to negative effects. Since people have idiosyncratic tastes in music, researchers need to be careful when selecting music for their studies. For example, in a mood induction study, it may not be effective to select songs that are rated as highly pleasant, since even the most popular songs could be aversive for individual listeners.