Sadness is normally something people arrange their lives to avoid, and then they queue up music that reliably produces it. An online survey of 772 participants from Western and Eastern backgrounds asked what the rewards actually are, which listener characteristics predict appreciating sad music, and by what route the music produces the feeling at all. The most frequent emotion reported is not the one in the question.
, more often than sadness, and four distinct rewards. The survey found rewards of imagination, , empathy, and the absence of implications. Appreciation followed a pattern and was greater in people high in empathy and low in emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness was the emotion most frequently evoked, and memory was rated the most important route by which the sadness arrives.
Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is usually avoided in everyday life. The question this study takes seriously is why, given that, people seek out and appreciate sadness in music. An online survey reached 772 participants, Western and Eastern, and was built to answer three things at once.
It investigated the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, and the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors. It also covered the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, including how those interact with personality traits.
Four rewards came out of it: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no real-life implications. Appreciation of sad music followed a mood-congruent fashion and was greater among individuals high in empathy and low in emotional stability. The trait empathy contributed to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal and by engaging social functions.
The surprise is what people actually report feeling. Nostalgia rather than sadness was the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music, and correspondingly memory was rated the most important principle through which sadness is evoked. A follow-up survey on happy music indicated differences between the two emotional experiences. The authors conclude that listening to sad music can produce beneficial effects including regulation of negative emotion and mood, and consolation, and that these constitute the prime motivations for engaging with it. It remains a survey of what listeners say about themselves.
wat. The commonest feeling people get from sad music is nostalgia, and the commonest route to it is memory.
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The no-real-life-implications reward explains the paradox without dissolving it. Music offers sadness with nothing at stake, which makes it usable for regulating a mood rather than merely enduring one.
How do we know?
Taruffi and Koelsch surveyed 772 Western and Eastern participants online about the rewards of music-evoked sadness, listener characteristics, situational factors and the principles through which music evokes sadness, with a follow-up survey on happy music.
What is still unknown
An online survey measuring what people report about their own listening, with no behavioral or physiological measure. Self-selected respondents to a survey about sad music are not a random sample of listeners.
Learn something?
Where to next
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