Music and sadness

Music and sadness

The experience of sadness when listening to music is a fascinating puzzle. It consists of seemingly conflicting emotional experiences: sad music may induce a range of positive emotions in some listeners, even though sadness as an emotion is considered to be negative. This paradox of enjoying negative emotions has parallels in all arts (tragedies literature, theatre, and films) and one can also think of other negative emotions such as fear which can be enjoyable in a safe context (e.g., horror films). This paradox has extensive roots in philosophy and psychology in general. Let us look at this paradox in more detail in music.

Sadness associated with music is NOT a singular emotion

Our research using several samples and methods has suggested that sad music generates three types of emotional experiences: truly sad, comforting, and pleasurable (Peltola & Eerola, 2016; Eerola & Peltola, 2016). Sad music can lead to feelings of pleasure related to enjoyment of the music in some people and feelings of comfort where sad music evokes memories. People also report painful experiences associated with listening to sad music, which invariably related to personal loss such as the death of a loved one, divorce, breakup, or other significant adversity in life. A recent review of over 120 music and sadness studies (Herdson et al., 2022) broke down the flavours of sadness into even more refined states such as bleak, empathetic sadness, sad mood maintenance, and others. Although we have focused into the pleasurable aspects of the experience involving sad music, the negative aspects of the experience cannot be dismissed easily; In lab-based listening experiments, we have shown that sad music is able to generate similar negative biases in cognitive processing to those produced by real, autobiographically induced sadness (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012). So listening to sad music can make you sad in a similar way as thinking about actual sad life events can induce the feeling of melancholy and sadness.

Deriving pleasure from sad music requires empathy

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We discovered that while many people report feeling relaxed and peaceful after listening to sad instrumental music, only highly empathic people report being deeply moved by such music (Eerola, Vuoskoski & Kautiainen, 2016). And the reason that they enjoy the experience is not really the sadness they enjoy, but rather the experience of being moved (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2017). This same underlying reason for enjoyment was previously shown to be the key driver behind enjoying sad films (Hanich et al., 2014). In other words, people who are willing to engage with a fictional event or the virtual agent represented by the music, will derive greater satisfaction from their engagement since they clearly enjoy the act of experiencing these types of emotions. It is not to say that individuals who are lower on empathy would not enjoy sad music, but at least in studies where measurement tools for emotions (self-reports and physiological indices) are not extremely sensitive, stronger responses are obtained with those who score high on empathy (or are open to new experiences).

Enjoyment of sad music is measurable via endocrine markers

We also explored a fascinating hypothesis that the pleasure generated by sad music is due to a set of endocrine releases that are part of homeostatic regulation. This idea, put forward by David Huron (2011), claims that people would experience real sadness and loss with music and this, in turn, would trigger release of hormones such as prolactin. Since music is just simulating or allowing the individual to simulate the feeling of loss without the actual loss, the result of the chemical would be experienced as pleasurable. It is a tantalising idea, but we demonstrated in 2021 that this hypothesis is not responsible for feelings of pleasure. However, this study did show that these feelings of pleasure are indeed measurable by neuroendocrine markers, namely oxytocin. After years of research on music and sadness, we compiled evidence on the mechanisms involved in cultural and biopsychosocial levels of explanations enjoying music-associated sadness (Eerola et al., 2018).

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For a seemingly simple topic of music and sadness, it has turned out to be a complex and nuanced set of experiences involving many different drivers.

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Written on February 29, 2024
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