Why Are We Attracted to Sad Music? by Sandra Garrido

Author:Sandra Garrido
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Experimental Evidence of the Effect of Sad Music on Mood

In the first study (Garrido & Schubert, 2015a), 335 participants self-selected one piece of sad music and one piece of happy music which they listened to in the context of the experiment. Before and after measures of depression were taken on the Profile of Mood States (POMS: McNair, Lorr, & Droppleman, 1971) at three time points: baseline; after the sad listening condition; and after the happy music condition. The POMS is a measure of current mood that contains six subscales including one for depression. It does not measure clinical depression. Trapnell and Campbell’s (1999) Rumination Reflectiveness Questionnaire (RRQ) was therefore included as a measure of coping style with rumination which could also indicate tendencies towards depression (see Chap. 6 for more information). We also included measures of the Big Five personality traits of neuroticism and openness to experience from the Big Five Aspect Scale (BFAS: DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007), a scale which looks at two distinct aspects of each trait: withdrawal and volatility (neuroticism), compassion and politeness (agreeableness), industriousness and orderliness (conscientiousness), enthusiasm and assertiveness (extraversion), and, intellect and openness (openness to experience).

The results showed that participants with high scores in rumination and neuroticism generally tended to be in a more depressed mood at the outset of the experiment than those with low scores in those traits, as can be seen from Fig. 8.1. Interestingly, both low and high ruminators experienced significant increases in depression after listening to their self-selected sad music. For non-ruminators this was likely a minor setback. However, for high ruminators who were already more depressed than their happier counterparts and who have more difficulty disengaging from negative thoughts and emotions, this could have been a more serious problem.

Fig. 8.1Changes in POMS depression scores for low and high ruminators

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