Category: Happiness

The real reason some people enjoy listening to sad music.

Music that makes you cry gives pleasure.

This might help to explain the enduring popularity of sad music.

The results come from a study that tested the cathartic effect of sad music.

Participants in the study were divided into two groups based on their responses to four questions:

“While listening to music, how frequently do you (1) get goose bumps, (2) feel shivers down your spine, (3) feel like weeping, and (4) get a lump in your throat?”

The researchers dubbed these the chills group (first two questions) and the tears groups (second two questions).

Then both groups listened to music that invoked their favourite feeling: either the chills or the tears.

The study’s authors explained the results:

“A song that induced chills was perceived as being both happy and sad whereas a song that induced tears was perceived as sad.

A tear-eliciting song was perceived as calmer than a chill-eliciting song.

These results show that tears involve pleasure from sadness and that they are psychophysiologically calming…”

It’s pretty easy to see why music that invokes chills would be pleasurable.

However, the study’s authors were slightly at a loss to explain what is so special about sad music:

“…sad songs induced strong pleasure.

It is difficult to account for why people feel sad music as pleasurable; however, the current results suggested that the benefit of cathartic tears might have a key role in the pleasure generated by sad music.”

One answer could be that music is such an ambiguous form, that it is easy to see your own life reflected in it.

The authors write:

“…listeners could identify with the sad character of the sad song and felt as if the singer knew their own sad experiences, making them feel understood and bringing pleasure…”

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The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Mori & Iwanaga, 2017).

It is linked to trying harder at difficult tasks, earning more money and being more satisfied at work.

Feeling happy leads to success. People who are happy try harder at difficult tasks, earn more money and are more satisfied with their jobs, psychologists have found in multiple studies. While we are often told that working hard will make us happy, the reverse may also be true, perhaps even more so. Happiness is neither a requirement for success nor the only way of achieving it — legendary leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill suffered from depression. However, happiness is linked to higher creativity, curiosity and greater striving for higher goals. The conclusions come from a review of many different studies on the connection between happiness and career success. The study’s authors explain their conclusions:

“Happiness is positively associated with job autonomy, job satisfaction, job performance, prosocial behavior, social support, popularity, and income. Happy people also receive more positive peer and supervisor evaluations and are less likely to withdraw from work by becoming habitually absent or burning out.”

When people are followed over time, their happiness seems to predict their later success, the authors write:

“…people who are happy at an initial time point are more likely to find employment, be satisfied with their jobs, acquire higher status, perform well, be productive, receive social support, be evaluated positively, engage in fewer withdrawal behaviors, and obtain higher income at a subsequent time point.”

Experiments conducted in the lab also point to happiness causing success:

“The experimental research demonstrates that when people are randomly assigned to experience positive emotions, they negotiate more collaboratively, set higher goals for themselves, persist at difficult tasks longer, evaluate themselves and others more favorably, help others more, and demonstrate greater creativity and curiosity than people assigned to experience neutral or negative emotions.”

The study was published in the Journal of Career Assessment (Walsh et al., 2018).