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Different people respond to music in different ways. Some people report feeling exulted by happy music and depressed by sad music. Other listeners who enjoy music just as much do not seem to be so susceptible to the emotions it expresses. A recent study by researchers in Finland sheds some light on these differences (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2013). Sad music really does seem to make listeners sad - at least some of them.
Jonna Vuoskoski and Tuomas Eerola, at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, recruited 120 subjects. Before the experiment started, the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to determine their emotional reactivity and level of empathy as a personality trait. Were they typically responsive to other people’s behaviour? Was it easy for them to take another’s perspective? Then the participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. Three of the groups listened to music. The first group listened to sad instrumental music chosen by the experimenters. The second group listened to emotionally neutral instrumental music chosen by the experimenters. The third group was asked to bring in music that made them sad. The fourth group did not listen to music. Instead they were asked to write in detail about a sad event in their past.
All of the participants, before and after either listening to music or describing a sad memory, filled out a questionnaire about their emotional state. However Vuoskoski and Eerola did not simply rely on self-reports. According to the “associative network” theory of affect (Bower 1981), individuals’ mental states influence the way that they interpret the world around them. When shown a picture of a face with an ambiguous expression, a happy person will read the expression as happy, and a sad person will see the expression as sad. Similarly, when tested on their recall of a list of emotion-related words, a happy person will more readily recall terms related to happiness, and a sad person will more easily recall words related to sadness. Vuoskoski and Eerola had their participants do both kinds of tests after they had either listened to music or completed the writing assignment.
What effect, if any, did the music that the participants listened to have on their mood? Compared with listeners who heard neutral music chosen by the experimenters, those who listened to sad music they had chosen themselves were significantly more likely to recall words related to negative emotions and to interpret ambiguous faces as being sad. This was also true for those participants who did not listen to music but instead wrote about a sad event in their lives. The evidence would seem to indicate that listening to sad music or writing about a sad event in one’s past had a genuine effect on participants’ emotional state, at least when the sad music has some personal association for listeners.
What of those listeners who heard unfamiliar sad music – sad music that held no personal associations for them? Some of these participants also seemed to be emotionally affected by the sad music. They, too, more readily recalled words related to negative emotions and tended to interpret ambiguous faces as being sad. But other listeners showed no such effects. The difference between them? Only those listeners who had scored high on the tests for empathy as a personality trait became sad after they listened to the sad music.
The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once wrote that music is the supreme scientific mystery. While this may indeed be true, we are coming a little closer to understanding its effect on human emotion.
References:
Bower, G.H. (1981) Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129-48.
Vuoskoski, J.K., & Eerola, T. (2013) Can sad music really make you sad? Indirect measures of affective states induced by music and autobiographical memories. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 6, 204-13.
