Chart: Generation Song

If your life had a soundtrack, which tunes would make the cut? The first song you slow-danced to? The guitar anthem you used to blast out your dorm room window? Past research has shown that the sounds and experiences of our youth make up a disproportionate share of our memories. But it turns out it’s not just “our music” that leaves us feeling wistful—so do the songs of Mom’s and Dad’s glory days.

In a paper published in Psychological Science, college-age participants listened to the top hits of the past half-century and rated how the songs made them feel. As expected, the undergrads reported fond feelings and plenty of nostalgia listening to songs from the late ’90s and 2000s (think “No Scrubs” by TLC). But researchers also found an earlier bump in positive associations with songs from the early ’80s—when the average subject’s parents were themselves young adults and “Billie Jean” dominated the airwaves.

Why? When today’s college students were impressionable little kids, they were steeped in the music of their parents’ generation: “It’s the music they cleaned the house to on the weekends,” says Carol Lynne Krumhansl, a psychologist at Cornell who led the study. But findings also show that the same young people have an affinity for music of the 1960s. While such a preference doesn’t quite fit the rest of the model, the researchers’ best guess is that the decade was an exceptional one for popular music—no matter when you first heard The Beatles, you probably liked them.