Study probes why we love sad music

Love listening to sad music? A new Japanese study finds that mournful songs might actually evoke positive emotions -- because experiencing sadness through art actually feels pleasant.

Lead researcher Ai Kawakami and colleagues at Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, asked 44 volunteers, including both musicians and non-musicians, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music. Subjects then were required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception of the music and their own emotional state.

The sad pieces of music included Glinka's "La Séparation" in F minor and Blumenfeld's Etude "Sur Mer" in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados's Allegro de Concierto in G major. To control for the "happy" effect of a major key, they also played the minor-key pieces in major key, and vice versa.

Findings showed that sad music evoked contradictory emotions because the subjects tended to feel sad music to be more tragic, less romantic, and less blithe than they felt themselves while listening to it, the researchers said.

"In general, sad music induces sadness in listeners, and sadness is regarded as an unpleasant emotion," they wrote in the study, announced July 11 and published online in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. "If sad music actually evokes only unpleasant emotion, we would not listen to it."

"Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotion as well as sad emotion. And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent emotion...," added the researchers.

Feeling sad through art and music actually feels good, unlike feeling sad in your daily life, possibly because the latter does not pose an actual threat to our safety, they explained. This could help people to deal with their negative emotions in daily life.

A separate 2011 study from the University of Groningen found that listening to a sad or happy song can not only alter to your mood to feel happier or sadder but also change your perception of what other people may be feeling.

Access: http://www.frontiersin.org/Emotion_Science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00311/abstract

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