Study Links Music With Listeners' Emotions

If you really want to get out of a foul mood, try listening to a little music.

A new study out of Penn State finds that music really can soothe the savage beast, up to a point, and it really doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to. As long as you like it.

"If you like music and choose to listen to it, it's probably going to make you feel better regardless of what type it is," says associate professor of psychology Valerie N. Stratton.

Stratton and associate music professor Annette H. Zalanowski, of Penn State's Altoona campus, teamed up to take music research out of the laboratory and put it in the real world in which we live. They wanted to see when people listen to music, what types of music they prefer, and what types of moods that music induces.

It turns out that most of us listen to it a lot, but usually when we're doing something else.

"We've been looking at music and behavior for quite a few years, and it finally struck us that most of the things we were doing, and most of the things that other people were doing, were within lab settings," says Stratton. "There was really very little out there that looked at how people listened to music in their daily lives."


The Kids Like Rock

This is not exactly a startling finding, but the researchers found that college-age students overwhelmingly prefer to listen to rock music, whether hard, heavy or modern, and that includes music majors. If they weren't listing to hard rock, the non-music majors preferred country and soft rock. The music majors opted for classical and jazz after rock. The researchers were a bit surprised to find that non-music majors listened to more music than the music majors. The non-music majors listened to an average of 161 minutes of music per day, compared to 117.7 minutes for the music majors.

It's not clear exactly why that turned out to be the case, but it may be that the music students spend more time listening to music in their classes, so listening during their free time is too much like the proverbial postman taking a walk on his day off.

Mood Music

If the results of the study apply to all of us, regardless of age, we don't spend a whole lot of time just sitting and listening to music. Most of the participants in the study listened to music while doing something else, and that activity apparently influenced their choice of music.

Soft background music is neat while socializing with your friends, but if it's time to hop on the exercise machine and work on those abs, a little jazz might be preferable, the researchers found.

The results of the study suggest that music is terrific when it comes to reinforcing, or elevating our positive moods, and can chase away some of our negative feelings, with one peculiar finding.

Among the non-music majors, sad, hateful and aggressive moods eased up a bit. But that didn't work for the music majors. For them, those feelings remained either unchanged, or rose slightly.

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