Sad music depresses sad adolescents: A listener’s profile

Abstract

This research explored both social context and personal characteristics in relation to being saddened by sad music when in a sad mood. Overall, 1686 respondents (aged 12-16 years; 44% female; 68% vocational training) answered questions about their background, social context (family climate, bullying issues), personal characteristics (depressive mood, self-esteem, social comparison style), and the degree to which they were saddened by listening to sad music. About 17% of the participants reported saddened mood as a consequence of listening to sad music when sad. Multivariate linear regression results revealed that female respondents and those who reported elevated levels of depressive mood and negative social comparison to peers were more likely to feel saddened. These young people further showed strained peer relations, as indicated by being bullied on social network sites and the Internet. Harsh family climate and low self-esteem correlated with the saddened mood-inducing effect of sad music, although they were not significant in multivariate analysis. This pattern of person and context relations with saddened mood was identical for girls and boys. Adolescents generally seek music that is mood-congruent; however, this research questioned whether adolescents with problems should dwell on music that reflects their unhappy state, as this may worsen their mood.

Neuroticism, musical emotion regulation, and mental health.

“…As such, here, I strived to consider musical emotion regulation as a more complex multidimensional construct that includes both beneficial and deleterious strategies (Miranda, 2020;Miranda & Blais-Rochette, 2020). Furthermore, and this is a paramount idea, the present findings add to the growing literature informing that music listening can be both beneficial and detrimental for mental health in youth development (Miranda & Claes, 2009;Saarikallio et al, 2015;ter Bogt et al, 2019).…”

The Benefits of Music Listening for Induced State Anxiety: Behavioral and Physiological Evidence

“…Each piece of music was divided into 15 s, 30 s and 45 s in length, which has been shown to better activate emotion [42]. We excluded sad music because it may worsen subjects' mood [43][44][45]. In addition, the blank stimulus (no sound) was used as a control condition.…”

“…Considering that the gamma band may play an important role in anxiety relief, we focused on the gamma band for the power spectrum analysis. Power spectrum amplitudes were calculated and compared across six conditions (neutral music: before the anxiety intervention vs. after the anxiety intervention; happy music: before the anxiety intervention vs. the after the anxiety intervention; blank stimulus: before the anxiety intervention vs. after the anxiety intervention) in the gamma band (35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45). Then, we calculated 2 regional brain segments, including the temporal lobe (T7, T8) and occipital lobe (O1, Oz, O2).…”

“…The superior temporal gyrus is known to be involved in auditory processing, where the characteristic response is mainly focused on the gamma band [26]. Indeed, a simple steady-state auditory click stimulation paradigm at gamma frequency (~40 Hz) has been reproducibly shown to reduce entrainment as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) in patients [27,28] and listening to music generating perceptual phenomenon was associated with different changes in gamma power (35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45) [29]. Acoustic tomography allows us to transform acoustic information into visual representations [30], and gamma is linked to the transformation of sensory signals along feedforward pathways [31].…”

Deep-Learning-Based Multimodal Emotion Classification for Music Videos

“…A number of studies have attempted to show how music carries human affective states [2] and boosts mood and self-confidence [3][4][5]. Sometimes, this emotional effect is counterintuitive, as even sad music can evoke pleasure and comfort in listeners [6,7]. Pannese et al [8] used the conceptual metaphor of a chain of musical emotion that emanates from a recording or performance and works its way to the audience and listeners.…”