Love the Indie musicians? Or can't get enough of Honey Singh? A recent study reveals that your musical likes and dislikes may say more about you than you think
Finland: While it may be normal for you to process your emotions while listening to your favourite sad song, a recent study says that there may be a deeper connection.
Researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä, Aalto University in Finland and Aarhus University in Denmark decided to investigate the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions.
"Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening," explains Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study.
Turns out sad music may just be a no-no for men. The brain imaging revealed that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males.
"This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," says Dr Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study and developer of the Music in Mood Regulation (MMR) test. However, in females who tended to listen to music to distract from negative feelings, there was increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC).
"The mPFC is active during emotion regulation," according to prof. Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study. "These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain."
Meanwhile, another study involved nearly 1,600 telephone interviews with adults in Vancouver and Toronto, who were asked about their likes and dislikes of 21 musical genres. According to the study, poorer, less-educated people tended to like country, disco, easy listening, golden oldies, heavy metal and rap. Meanwhile, their wealthier and better-educated counterparts preferred genres such as classical, blues, jazz, opera, choral, pop, reggae, rock, world and musical theatre.
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