The Paradox of Music-Evoked Sadness: An Online Survey

Abstract

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.

An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music

“…Taruffi and Koelsch [23] expanded this explanation by bringing in the role of memories and deliberate savouring of emotions, whereas Juslin [33] also evoked the same rationale by explaining that sad music may combine two independent mechanisms, contagion of negative emotion and the aesthetic judgment mechanism that leads to an overall pleasurable response. Sachs and his colleagues 120 [34] interpreted the paradox from the perspective of adjusting homeostatic imbalances.…”

“…Mechanisms such as episodic memories, emotional contagion, and eval- 75 uative conditioning have been offered to account for music-induced sadness in particular [23]. A later update to the mechanisms also includes aesthetic judgement (which has been taken to explain the enjoyment of sad music as well; [24]).…”

Theoretical Proposals on How Vertical Harmony May Convey Nostalgia and Longing in Music

“…Also, Wildschut et al (2006) and Sedikides et al (2008) suggest that sadness and negative mood is often a trigger of nostalgia. A recent study by Taruffi and Koelsch (2014) suggests that nostalgia is actually the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music. This could be surmised to be an effect of episodic memory, in the sense that the melancholic and sad stimuli trigger episodic memories and hence nostalgia.…”

“…Juslin (2011) proposes that on the basis of previous survey studies both nostalgia and longing are among the most common emotions evoked by music, and nostalgia's prominence among music-induced feelings has also been pointed out by, for example, Zentner and Eerola (2010). In a recent study by Taruffi and Koelsch (2014), nostalgia was indicated as the most frequent emotion evoked by sad music among a large and heterogeneous pool of participants. Interestingly, the prevalence of nostalgia in music is not only limited to felt emotional experiences, since it is common also as a perceived emotion in music (Juslin & Laukka, 2004).…”

Sharing experienced sadness: Negotiating meanings of self-defined sad music within a group interview session

“…Thus, people often report that they prefer to listen to sad music when they are alone, or when feeling lonely (Peltola & Eerola, 2016;Taruffi & Koelsch, 2014;Van den Tol & Edwards, 2013).…”