This study explores listeners’ experience of music-evoked sadness. Sadness is typically assumed to be undesirable and is therefore usually avoided in everyday life. Yet the question remains: Why do people seek and appreciate sadness in music? We present findings from an online survey with both Western and Eastern participants (N = 772). The survey investigates the rewarding aspects of music-evoked sadness, as well as the relative contribution of listener characteristics and situational factors to the appreciation of sad music. The survey also examines the different principles through which sadness is evoked by music, and their interaction with personality traits. Results show 4 different rewards of music-evoked sadness: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no “real-life” implications. Moreover, appreciation of sad music follows a mood-congruent fashion and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability. Surprisingly, nostalgia rather than sadness is the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music. Correspondingly, memory was rated as the most important principle through which sadness is evoked. Finally, the trait empathy contributes to the evocation of sadness via contagion, appraisal, and by engaging social functions. The present findings indicate that emotional responses to sad music are multifaceted, are modulated by empathy, and are linked with a multidimensional experience of pleasure. These results were corroborated by a follow-up survey on happy music, which indicated differences between the emotional experiences resulting from listening to sad versus happy music. This is the first comprehensive survey of music-evoked sadness, revealing that listening to sad music can lead to beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music in everyday life.

Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cultures, mostly due to its power to evoke and regulate emotions. However, effects of music evoking different emotional experiences such as sadness and happiness on cognition, and in particular on self-generated thought, are unknown. Here we use probe-caught thought sampling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the influence of sad and happy music on mind-wandering and its underlying neuronal mechanisms. In three experiments we found that sad music, compared with happy music, is associated with stronger mind-wandering (Experiments 1A and 1B) and greater centrality of the nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN) (Experiment 2). Thus, our results demonstrate that, when listening to sad vs. happy music, people withdraw their attention inwards and engage in spontaneous, self-referential cognitive processes. Importantly, our results also underscore that DMN activity can be modulated as a function of sad and happy music. These findings call for a systematic investigation of the relation between music and thought, having broad implications for the use of music in education and clinical settings.

Visual mental imagery has been characterized as an important aspect of our mental life, which consists of "seeing" in the absence of a sensory stimulus. However, the mechanisms underlying how visual mental images unfold during music listening have remained largely neglected. Here, we review the existing literature on the relation between music-evoked emotions and images and we draw attention on how visual mental imagery has been previously conceptualized in the music domain. We also propose to adopt a conceptual framework from research on spontaneous cognition, which will promote a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the different types of music-evoked visual mental imagery. Finally, we highlight how music's capability to trigger images can be harnessed in daily life as well as therapeutic practices to foster the benefits and minimize the costs of visual mental imagery.

Directed, intentional imagination is pivotal for self-regulation in the form of escapism and therapies for a wide variety of mental health conditions, such anxiety and stress disorders, as well as phobias. Clinical application in particular benefits from increasing our understanding of imagination, as well as non-invasive means of influencing it. To investigate imagination, this study draws from the prior observation that music can influence the imagined content during non-directed mind-wandering, as well as the finding that relative orientation within time and space is retained in imagination. One hundred participants performed a directed imagination task that required watching a video of a figure travelling towards a barely visible landmark, and then closing their eyes and imagining a continuation of the journey. During each imagined journey, participants either listened to music or silence. After the imagined journeys, participants reported vividness, the imagined time passed and distance travelled, as well as the imagined content. Bayesian mixed effects models reveal strong evidence that vividness, sentiment, as well imagined time passed and distances travelled, are influenced by the music, and show that aspects of these effects can be modelled through features such as tempo. The results highlight music’s potential to support therapies such as Exposure Therapy and Imagery Rescripting, which deploy directed imagination as a clinical tool.

Research has shown that mind-wandering, negative mood, and poor wellbeing are closely related, stressing the importance of exploring contexts or tools that can stimulate positive thoughts and images. While music represents a promising option, work on this topic is still scarce with only a few studies published, mainly featuring laboratory or online music listening tasks. Here, I used the experience sampling method for the first time to capture mind-wandering during personal music listening in everyday life, aiming to test for the capacity of music to facilitate beneficial styles of mind-wandering and to explore its experiential characteristics. Twenty-six participants used a smart-phone application that collected reports of thought, mood, and emotion during music listening or other daily-life activities over 10 days. The application was linked to a music playlist, specifically assembled to induce positive and relaxing emotions. Results showed that mind-wandering evoked during music and non-music contexts had overall similar characteristics, although some minor differences were also observed. Most importantly, music-evoked emotions predicted thought valence, thereby indicating music as an effective tool to regulate thoughts via emotion. These findings have important applications for music listening in daily life as well as for the use of music in health interventions.