Emotional benefits of music
How Does Music Affect Your Mood and Emotions
By Suzanne Boothby on April 13, 2017
New research shows that even sad music can lift your mood, while other studies suggest music can boost happiness and reduce anxiety.
From the drumbeats of our ancient ancestors to today’s unlimited streaming services, music is an integral part of the human experience.
Researchers have pondered the possible therapeutic and mood boosting benefits of music for centuries.
Even sad music brings most listeners pleasure and comfort, according to recent research from Durham University in the United Kingdom and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, published in PLOS ONE.
Conversely, the study found that for some people, sad music can cause negative feelings of profound grief.
The research involved three surveys of more than 2,400 people in the United Kingdom and Finland, focusing on the emotions and memorable experiences associated with listening to sad songs.
The majority of experiences reported by participants were positive.
“The results help us to pinpoint the ways people regulate their mood with the help of music, as well as how music rehabilitation and music therapy might tap into these processes of comfort, relief, and enjoyment,” said lead author, Tuomas Eerola, Ph.D., a professor of music cognition at Durham University, in a press release.
He also said the study may help find reasons for both listening to and avoiding sad music.
An earlier study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that people tend to prefer sad music when they are experiencing a deep interpersonal loss, like the end of a relationship.
The authors of that study suggested that sad music provides a substitute for the lost relationship. They compared it to the preference most people have for an empathic friend — someone who truly understands what you’re going through.
Other research has focused on the joy upbeat music can bring.
A 2013 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that people who listened to upbeat music could improve their moods and boost their happiness in just two weeks.
In the study, participants were instructed to try to improve their mood, but they only succeeded when they listened to the upbeat music of Copland as opposed to the sadder tunes of Stravinsky.
And a happier mood brings benefits beyond feeling good. In a press release, lead study author, Yuna Ferguson, noted that happiness has been linked to better physical health, higher income, and greater relationship satisfaction.
Read more: The music you choose may say something about your mental health »
This music research aligns with the larger arena of music therapy.
The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) reports that music therapy programs can be designed to achieve goals such as managing stress, enhancing memory, and alleviating pain.
It might seem surprising that music can help people cope with physical pain, but research has shown a clear link.
A 2015 review in The Lancetfound that people who listened to music before, during, or after surgery experienced less pain and anxiety, compared to patients who did not listen to music.
The music listeners didn’t even need as much pain medication.
To conduct the study, researchers looked at data from 73 different trials, involving more than 7,000 patients.
The people who experienced a slightly greater, but nonsignificant, reduction in pain, and needed the least pain medication, were the ones who got to pick their own music.
“Music is a non-invasive, safe, cheap intervention that should be available to everyone undergoing surgery,” lead study author Catherine Meads, Ph.D., of Brunel University in the United Kingdom, recommended in a press release.
When it comes to treating chronic conditions, music therapy can also play a powerful role.
A recent review in the World Journal of Psychiatry found that music therapy can be an effective treatment for mood disorders related to neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, dementia, stroke, and multiple sclerosis.
After reviewing 25 trials, the researchers concluded that music is a valid therapy to potentially reduce depression and anxiety, as well as to improve mood, self-esteem, and quality of life.
They also noted that no negative side effects were reported in any of the trials, making music a low-risk treatment.
Barry Goldstein, a recording artist who has studied the vibrational effects of music for more than 25 years, says music has a profound impact on the brain.
In a column for Conscious Lifestyle magazine, Goldstein wrote that music can actually enhance brain functions.
He said music can evoke emotion, help regain memories, stimulate new neural connections, and active attention.
Read more: Music and the brain »
While listening to music may bring greater health benefits, creating it can be an effective therapy, too.
A unique orchestra for people with dementia helped improve their mood and boost their self-confidence, according to researchers at the Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) in Dorset, U.K.
The orchestra is one of several BUDI research projects that aims to demonstrate how people with dementia can still learn new skills and have fun.
Eight people with dementia and seven caregivers participated in the project, along with students and professional musicians.
“Music touches everyone in some way, either by listening or playing,” said Anthea Innes, Ph.D., head of BUDI, in a press release.
She said that the orchestra has been a life-enhancing project for everyone involved, and that the project challenges the negative public perceptions of people diagnosed with dementia.
“Working together to produce a collaborative output is a powerful way to bring out the best in people — not just in terms of their musical skills, but their communication skills, friendships, care, and support for one another,” she added.
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on May 17, 2013. It was updated by Jenna Flannigan on August 3, 2016, and again by David Mills on April 13, 2017.
Read more: The science behind the awesome feeling of discovering new music »
How Does Music Affect Your Mood and Emotions
By Suzanne Boothby on April 13, 2017
New research shows that even sad music can lift your mood, while other studies suggest music can boost happiness and reduce anxiety.
From the drumbeats of our ancient ancestors to today’s unlimited streaming services, music is an integral part of the human experience.
Researchers have pondered the possible therapeutic and mood boosting benefits of music for centuries.
Even sad music brings most listeners pleasure and comfort, according to recent research from Durham University in the United Kingdom and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, published in PLOS ONE.
Conversely, the study found that for some people, sad music can cause negative feelings of profound grief.
The research involved three surveys of more than 2,400 people in the United Kingdom and Finland, focusing on the emotions and memorable experiences associated with listening to sad songs.
The majority of experiences reported by participants were positive.
“The results help us to pinpoint the ways people regulate their mood with the help of music, as well as how music rehabilitation and music therapy might tap into these processes of comfort, relief, and enjoyment,” said lead author, Tuomas Eerola, Ph.
D., a professor of music cognition at Durham University, in a press release.
He also said the study may help find reasons for both listening to and avoiding sad music.
An earlier study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that people tend to prefer sad music when they are experiencing a deep interpersonal loss, like the end of a relationship.
The authors of that study suggested that sad music provides a substitute for the lost relationship. They compared it to the preference most people have for an empathic friend — someone who truly understands what you’re going through.
Other research has focused on the joy upbeat music can bring.
A 2013 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that people who listened to upbeat music could improve their moods and boost their happiness in just two weeks.
In the study, participants were instructed to try to improve their mood, but they only succeeded when they listened to the upbeat music of Copland as opposed to the sadder tunes of Stravinsky.
And a happier mood brings benefits beyond feeling good. In a press release, lead study author, Yuna Ferguson, noted that happiness has been linked to better physical health, higher income, and greater relationship satisfaction.
Read more: The music you choose may say something about your mental health »
This music research aligns with the larger arena of music therapy.
The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) reports that music therapy programs can be designed to achieve goals such as managing stress, enhancing memory, and alleviating pain.
It might seem surprising that music can help people cope with physical pain, but research has shown a clear link.
A 2015 review in The Lancetfound that people who listened to music before, during, or after surgery experienced less pain and anxiety, compared to patients who did not listen to music.
The music listeners didn’t even need as much pain medication.
To conduct the study, researchers looked at data from 73 different trials, involving more than 7,000 patients.
The people who experienced a slightly greater, but nonsignificant, reduction in pain, and needed the least pain medication, were the ones who got to pick their own music.
“Music is a non-invasive, safe, cheap intervention that should be available to everyone undergoing surgery,” lead study author Catherine Meads, Ph.D., of Brunel University in the United Kingdom, recommended in a press release.
When it comes to treating chronic conditions, music therapy can also play a powerful role.
A recent review in the World Journal of Psychiatry found that music therapy can be an effective treatment for mood disorders related to neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, dementia, stroke, and multiple sclerosis.
After reviewing 25 trials, the researchers concluded that music is a valid therapy to potentially reduce depression and anxiety, as well as to improve mood, self-esteem, and quality of life.
They also noted that no negative side effects were reported in any of the trials, making music a low-risk treatment.
Barry Goldstein, a recording artist who has studied the vibrational effects of music for more than 25 years, says music has a profound impact on the brain.
In a column for Conscious Lifestyle magazine, Goldstein wrote that music can actually enhance brain functions.
He said music can evoke emotion, help regain memories, stimulate new neural connections, and active attention.
Read more: Music and the brain »
While listening to music may bring greater health benefits, creating it can be an effective therapy, too.
A unique orchestra for people with dementia helped improve their mood and boost their self-confidence, according to researchers at the Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) in Dorset, U.K.
The orchestra is one of several BUDI research projects that aims to demonstrate how people with dementia can still learn new skills and have fun.
Eight people with dementia and seven caregivers participated in the project, along with students and professional musicians.
“Music touches everyone in some way, either by listening or playing,” said Anthea Innes, Ph.D., head of BUDI, in a press release.
She said that the orchestra has been a life-enhancing project for everyone involved, and that the project challenges the negative public perceptions of people diagnosed with dementia.
“Working together to produce a collaborative output is a powerful way to bring out the best in people — not just in terms of their musical skills, but their communication skills, friendships, care, and support for one another,” she added.
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on May 17, 2013. It was updated by Jenna Flannigan on August 3, 2016, and again by David Mills on April 13, 2017.
Read more: The science behind the awesome feeling of discovering new music »
Why some people get "emotional chills" from music / Sudo Null IT News - all these are names of the same phenomenon, for which there is no established term in the language.
In scientific terms, these are transcendental psychophysiological experiences, or, more simply, a wave of pleasure that sometimes passes through the skin when listening to certain pieces of music. As a trigger, not only music works, but also physical contact with a person, an emotional scene in a feature film, etc. There is even a /r/frission community on Reddit, whose members share “skin orgasm” triggers with each other. Why does such a psycho-physiological reaction to emotional stimuli occur? Why is it observed not in everyone, but only in some people? Scientists have not yet been able to fully study this phenomenon, but half a century of research allows us to make some assumptions.
Eastern Washington University social psychology professor Amani El-Alayli explains that emotional chills can be caused by a piece of music that includes unexpected harmonies, sudden changes in volume, or simply an artist walking on stage.
One of the triggers for emotional chills from the Reddit community
Previous scientific research has identified several pieces of music that most often trigger the effect.
Here are some of them:
- The first two minutes and 11 seconds of Bach's St. John Passion: Part 1 (Herr, unser Herrscher), the moment the choir enters
- First two minutes and 18 seconds of Piano Concerto No. 1: II (Chopin)
- The first 53 seconds of Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing At All"
- The first three minutes and 21 seconds of Vangelis' piece for NASA's Mythodea: Movement 6 mission
- The first two minutes of Hans Zimmer's "Oogway Ascends" (used as the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack)
Such a reaction can arise not only from music. For example, here is another example from the Reddit community: a video of an interview with a prisoner of war, which in Morse code conveys the word "torture" (torture).
Some physiologists and zoologists suggest that emotional chills are an evolutionary vestige left over from our distant (and hairier) ancestors. They warmed the body by creating an endothermic layer of warm air around the skin directly under the coat (under the skin hairs).
That is, the same principle of thermoregulation works here, because of which curly hair is more common among residents of hot countries. Curls protect only the head, and the rise of wool during a sharp change in ambient temperature protects the whole body at once.
With the invention of clothing, the need for such thermoregulation disappeared, but the trigger itself remained in the brain and somehow reconfigured to a new set of input data, namely, emotional sensations. Now the effect occurs with a sharp change in emotions, and not the temperature of the environment. Accordingly, any object that causes a sharp emotional response becomes a trigger.
According to various estimates, the effect is experienced by 55% to 86% of the population.
Eastern Washington University conducted a large-scale study in which participants listened to the above passages and reported their reactions at the touch of a button.
Previous research has found that people who are more likely to have this effect also score higher on the openness to experience trait test.
As it turned out, such people have an unusually active imagination, appreciate beauty and nature, seek new sensations, often immerse themselves deeply in their feelings (reflect) and love diversity in life.
A new study showed a different result: here the frequency of emotional chills is directly related to the degree of immersion in music. In other words, we are talking not so much about emotional as about cognitive components of the psychological quality "openness to experience".
The results of a study on the relationship of emotional chills from music and cognitive abilities of the brain were published on April 27, 2016 in the journal Psychology of Music (doi: 10.1177/0305735615572358).
Why does music make us feel? [translation] • Stereo.ru
Almost every day it happens that I cry when listening to a song. A tear or two, or not even a tear at all, but just a sob, a sudden surging feeling. As a rule, I have no memories of this composition - often I hear it for the first time.
If you ask what triggered an emotional response in me, I can point to a specific guitar sound or vocal timbre. But this is followed by the question: why exactly did they affect me in this way?
Naturally, the same applies to other emotions caused by music: be it joy or irritation. Personally, I cannot explain this phenomenon, but, fortunately, there is a lot of scientific literature on this topic. Let's try asking the experts.
Elisabeth H. Margulis
Head of the Music Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, author of On Repeat: How Music Plays with the Mind
In his classic work Patrik Juslin and Daniel Västfjall identified several mechanisms underlying the emotional response to music.
The most basic level: brainstem reflexes will provide fright when confronted with sudden loud sounds. If a certain sequence of sounds regularly appears in a pair with some object or circumstance, then the associative connection will be fixed - a kind of conditioned reflex will work.
Music can evoke processes in a person that mirror its mood, and thus give rise to emotions. It triggers the imagination, leads to thoughts and memories, which in themselves force an emotional response. Finally, it may or may not meet the listener's expectations.
I would add one more thing to this: music can take a person out of the habitual state of observing the world, making him a subject, an accomplice, a creator of those sounds that many find so beautiful. Of course, I have named only a part of the great many ways that listening to or composing music can affect our feelings.
Saiki Louie
Assistant Professor of Creative Practice Studies at Northeastern University, Head of the Music, Visualization, and Neural Activity Lab
In my laboratory we study the effect of music on our brain. I have always been interested in how music makes us feel those same tingles, also called goosebumps. In one of our studies, we asked ourselves: are there any differences in brain structure that could explain individual responses to listening to music?
We launched an online survey with several hundred people.
It turned out that some people regularly experienced tingling while listening to music, while some of the respondents almost never feel these goosebumps. We invited test subjects from these two groups to our lab after additional selection based on age, gender, level of musical education, and other personal factors.
First, we verified that the goosebumps did in fact respond physiologically: certain pieces of music made their hearts beat faster and their skin more conductive to fluids (particularly sweat). We then scanned the brains of subjects from both groups and found that people who are susceptible to goosebumps have a higher concentration of white matter, which connects two areas of the brain: responsible for the perception of sounds and associated with emotions and social experience.
So the conduction of the brain, namely the connection between the auditory and emotional centers, is apparently responsible for how we perceive music. We can say that music serves as an auditory channel to the emotional centers of the brain.
Maybe that's why we make playlists for the ones we love.
Daniel Shanahan
Associate Professor of Music Theory and Cognitive Science at The Ohio State University
It's so strange that people often intentionally listen to sad music. Many of us do this, but it is not entirely clear why. A 2011 study by Sandra Garrido and Emery Schubert found that about half of the people surveyed agreed, or even strongly agreed, with the statement "I like to listen to music that makes me feel sad or bad."
Sadness and sadness are very broad and complex concepts, but I believe that they should be associated with empathy and compassion. Researchers David Huron and Jonna Vuoskoskiarge confirm that sad music lovers score high on tests of empathic response—in other words, they have a much better sense of compassion. Such social behavior has serious evolutionary advantages, so there is nothing strange about it. Let's see what other results in this area can give us future research.
As far as nostalgia is concerned, there are many studies that explore the relationship between music and memory triggers. It seems that we tend to better remember events associated with certain periods of life (in particular, with adolescence). Probably, the fact is that during these periods we experience a large number of changes.
I think this is the reason why Spotify's Time Capsule playlists are so popular. It doesn't seem too difficult to figure out your age, musical preferences, and then just set off nostalgic triggers by queuing up the most popular and significant songs from your youth.
Music also helps us to connect with each other. I think one of the most important evolutionary features of music is precisely to provide these social connections and enhance the sense of cohesion. An example of this is dance and, in general, any ritual.
When the whole world went into lockdown in March 2020, many were surprised at the number of people who went out to their balconies to play music together.
But it's completely logical! We were in dire need of socialization and empathy, and music is perhaps the best remedy in such a situation.
Diane Deutsch
Professor of Psychology at the University of California San Diego and author of Auditory Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Reveal the Mysteries of Our Brains
scientists have been arguing about the reasons for this behavior for centuries. Back in the 19th century, Charles Darwin argued that it was mainly a matter of courting females.
Soon after, Herbert Spencer offered a more complex explanation: in his opinion, music was not only created for "marriage games", but also generated by a wide range of vocalizations - sounds made under the influence of various emotional impulses: feelings of joy, superiority, grief or rage .
A recent large-scale study by Harvard University showed that we can indeed identify different types of music - love melodies, dance motifs, lullabies - regardless of culture and ethnicity.
So music serves a variety of purposes and is capable of reproducing many emotions like love, joy, anger, feelings of togetherness, etc.
For music to be successful, we must want to listen to it. What exactly makes us listen to this or that melody again and again? In the 1920s, Irving Berlin offered a set of guidelines for writing popular songs. In his opinion, simplicity is very important here, as well as recognition of the elements of the melody.
"There is no such thing as a new melody," he insisted, explaining that successful composers simply "put together bits of known motifs in a new order to make it all sound like a new thing." These tips have proven to be extremely effective.
Also, the main reason some songs stick so much is because they are repetitive phrases. These repetitions make the melody stick in our head. And in general, the more familiar the song is to us, the more we want to listen to it again.
Mariusz S. Kozak
Associate Professor of Music and Music Theory at Columbia University and author of An Introduction to Time Signature: The Bodily Experience of New Music
The emotional musical experience is always highly individual.
I can listen to the same song as you, but feel completely different things. Or you can listen to the same song under different circumstances - and each time experience new emotions. That is why, it seems to me, music does not produce emotions in us directly, but creates a structure, a certain template that allows us to perceive sometimes incredibly strong emotions.
In my work, I came to perceive music as a technology created by man at the dawn of his development as a species in order to organize and maintain society. This technology works on three levels: physiological, cognitive and social.
At the physiological level, changes in basic acoustic properties - rhythm, timbre and loudness - significantly affect the functioning of our body. For example, a fast tempo or louder volume can cause our heart rate to rise, while a sharp creaking sound can make us tense up and cringe. And since these sounds are generated by specific objects around us, we build associative rows and endow certain sounds with positive or negative connotations.
The same thing happens with more complex emotional responses.
The next level is cognitive. We are all brought up on the music that belongs to our culture, and develop the concept of style and form based on it. For example, most listeners who have been familiar with Western pop music since childhood will easily determine the boundary between a verse and a chorus in any song they are unfamiliar with. Or they will be able to catch the beginning of the fading of the melody when the song comes to an end.
This knowledge sets us up for some expectations from listening: we intuitively feel which accompaniment or rhythm section will best suit this or that melody. Musicians, on the other hand, use these expectations of ours, creating tense and relaxing moments in music, making us experience difficult to convey sensations like the same goosebumps.
Finally, we move on to the social level, perhaps the most significant in the context of talking about emotions in music. Around the world, music is almost always heard in the context of some social interaction of many people.
