Who enjoys listening to sad music and why

By Jonna Vuoskoski, William Forde Thompson, Doris McIlwain, Tuomas Eerola. 2012

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

although people generally avoid negative emotional experiences in general, they often enjoy sadness portrayed in music and other arts. The present study investigated what kinds of subjective emotional experiences are induced in listeners by sad music, and whether the tendency to enjoy sad music is associated with particular personality traits. One hundred forty-eight participants listened to 16 music excerpts and rated their emotional responses. As expected, sadness was the most salient emotion experienced in response to sad excerpts. However, other more positive and complex emotions such as nostalgia, peacefulness, and wonder were also evident. Furthermore, two personality traits – Openness to Experience and Empathy – were associated with liking for sad music and with the intensity of emotional responses induced by sad music, suggesting that aesthetic appreciation and empathetic engagement play a role in the enjoyment of sad music.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Music

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18a081610da6327828098f1de0485a910a2be83d

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Citations in the corpus

Listening to sad music in adverse situations: How music selection strategies relate to self-regulatory goals, listening effects, and mood enhancement (2015, background): “Moreover, findings by Vuoskoski et al. (2012) indicate that people who score high on the traits aesthetic appreciation and empathetic engagement enjoy sad music to a greater extent than people who score low on either one of these traits.”
Current Emotion Research in Music Psychology (2015, background): “In line with this view, participants report positive emotions such as nostalgia and wonder in addition to sadness when they listen to sad sounding music (Vuoskoski et al., 2012).”
Music as an emotion regulation strategy: An examination of genres of music and their roles in emotion regulation (2019, background): “…Kunde, 2016; Sharman & Dingle, 2015; Thoma, Ryf, Mohiyeddini, Ehlert, & Nater, 2012; Trehub, Ghazban, & Corbeil, 2015; Van Den Tol & Edwards, 2014; Vieillard, Harm, & Bigand, 2015; Vuoskoski & Thompson, 2012; White & Rickard, 2015; Zoteyeva, Forbes, & Rickard, 2015) positive and negative emotions.”
Extramusical information contributes to emotions induced by music (2015, result): “Nevertheless, our results support previously made suggestions (see e.g., Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2012; Vuoskoski et al., 2012) that the enjoyment of sad music (and of sad fiction in general; Knobloch-Westerwick, Gong, Hagner, & Kerbeykian, 2012) may be positively associated with the intensity of…”
Music May Reduce Loneliness and Act as Social Surrogate for a Friend: Evidence from an Experimental Listening Study (2020, background): “disposition seem to enjoy sad music more than others (Vuoskoski et al., 2012).”
Adaptive and maladaptive attraction to negative emotions in music (2013, background): “However, studies on the use of sad music for mood regulation tend to omit consideration of maladaptive motivations for listening to sad music listening (see for e.g. Van den Tol & Edwards, 2011; Vuoskoski et al., 2012).”
The Song Is You (2016, background): “…measure the perceived attributes in the music they administer but rather group the stimuli into a single category based on its (often superficial) genre or style designation (e.g., Langmeyer, et al., 2012; Rawlings, Barrantes-Vidal, & Furnham, 2000; Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIlwain, & Eerola, 2012).”
From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: towards a unified theory of musical emotions. (2013, background): “However, this account appears inconsistent with recent findings from a study by Vuoskoski et al. (2012), which indicated that experienced sadness to pieces of music was rated as pleasurable to some degree, whereas responses to scary music were rated as only unpleasant.”