TEAR-JERKERS such as Adele’s Someone Like You frequently top the charts these days, while gloomy classical compositions like Mozart’s Requiem have moved people for centuries.
So why is it that, in the arts, themes such as loss can be safely experienced, profoundly enjoyed and even celebrated?
Researchers have long been puzzled about this phenomenon and it’s not until fairly recently that we have started to gain some insight into how we enjoy music.
Now, a new study by colleagues and me, published in Frontiers in Psychology, has discovered why some of us enjoy sad music more than others – and it's got a lot to do with empathy.
Research has already shown that open individuals typically score highly on musical sophistication, while “systemisers”, those with a strong interest in patterns, systems and rules, tend to prefer intense music such as rock and punk.
But what about sad music? Surely nobody would like it unless the emotion experienced is not actual sadness but some kind of transformed version of it?
For some, sad music actually deepens and amplifies the feelings of sorrow and loss – emotions that are connected to personal events and memories. These experiences are far from pleasurable and therefore do not offer an explanation.
For others, sad music brings about feelings of melancholia, the kind of sentiment you might have on a rainy day after your favourite team lost.
The most curious type of experience, however, is the feeling of being moved, which we think is the basis of our fascination with sad music.
Intuitively, it would make sense that those who easily feel empathy are also easily moved. To test this hypothesis, we recruited a nationally representative sample of 102 participants to a listening experiment. We played them a piece of instrumental sad music, Discovery of the Camp by Michael Kamen, which was briefly played in the drama miniseries Band of Brothers.
Our decision to focus on instrumental music that participants would be unlikely to have heard previously was to rule out any external sources of emotions, such as memories they might have for a particular piece or interpretations of the lyrics.
In other words, we wanted to be sure the participants’ emotional responses would be brought about by the music itself.
The experiences generated by this particular music ranged from feeling relaxed or moved to sometimes being anxious or nervous. Participants who experienced being moved reported intense, pleasurable and yet sad emotions at the same time.
Crucially, we found that the people who were moved by the piece also scored highly on empathy. Conversely, those low on empathy hardly ever reported being moved.
What's more, our findings suggest that the key to the enjoyment is not only the ability to empathise with the sad emotions expressed by the music, but also the ability to self-regulate and distance oneself from this process. This specific component of empathy is known as “empathic concern”.
People sensitive and willing to empathise with the misfortune of another person – in this case represented by the sad music – are somehow rewarded by the process. There are a number of theories as to why.
The reward could be purely biochemical. We have all experienced the feeling of relief and serenity after a good cry. This is due to a cocktail of chemicals triggered by crying.
It is also possible that the effect is mainly psychological, where those who allow themselves to be emotionally immersed in the sad music are simply exercising their full emotional repertoire in a way that is inherently rewarding.
Music could almost be compared to a powerful drug. If empathy lies at the core of transforming this “drug” into pleasure or pain, could music itself be used to train people to be more empathetic?
Understanding the emotional transformations induced by sad music could certainly help us understand how musical interventions could be used on emotional disorders.
Eerola is Professor of Music Cognition at Durham University. This article first appeared in The Conversation.