Who enjoys listening to violent music and why?

Abstract

Negative emotions are usually avoided in daily life yet often appreciated in artistic endeavors. The present study investigated emotional experiences induced by death metal music with extremely violent themes and examined whether enjoyment of this genre of music is associated with personality traits. Fans (N ϭ 48) and nonfans (N ϭ 97) listened to 60-s excerpts of death metal music and rated their emotional experiences. Compared with nonfans, fans experienced a wide range of positive emotions including power, joy, peace, and wonder. In contrast, nonfans reported uniformly negative experiences, including tension, anger, and fear. Fans and nonfans were also distinguished by personality traits, with fans lower in conscientiousness and agreeableness, and in their motivations for listening to music. Results suggest that individuals with certain personality traits and music-listening motivations are drawn toward aggressive music with violent themes, and their enthusiasm for this genre promotes a range of positive emotional responses to this music. Public Policy Relevance StatementMusic listening is a ubiquitous pastime for teenagers, but when that music contains themes of extreme violence, questions arise as to who listens to this music and why. Here, we show that fans of violent music differ from nonfans in personality, with lower conscientiousness and agreeableness. They also have different motivations for listening to music and contrasting emotional responses to violent music, with fans reporting feelings of power and joy, and nonfans reporting feelings of tension, fear, and anger.

13 Reasons Why Not: A Methodological and Meta‐Analytic Review of Evidence Regarding Suicide Contagion by Fictional Media

“…This finding appears to comport reasonably well with other recent evidence suggesting heavy metal music is not harmful to or may even be beneficial to fans of this genre (e.g. Sharman & Dingle, ; Thompson, Geeves, & Olson, ).…”

Sound context modulates perceived vocal emotion

“…However, contrary to what would be predicted e.g. by the aesthetic enjoyment of nonlinear vocal sounds in rough musical textures by death metal fans (Thompson, Geeves & Olsen, 2018) or more generally, the suggestion of the top-down deactivation of the effect of nonlinear features in appropriate musical contexts (Zatorre & Belin, 2015), we did not find any incongruency effect between musical contexts and vocal signals, and in particular did not find support for the notion that the presence of a distorted guitar would reduce emotional effects of nonlinearities in voices. Instead, screams with high levels of portrayed vocal arousal were perceived as more negative and more emotionally aroused in the context of background nonlinearities.…”

Enjoy The Violence: Is appreciation for extreme music the result of cognitive control over the threat response system?

“…While these results have implications for a growing corpus of psychological studies of metal music (Gowensmith and Bloom 1997;Bodner and Bensimon 2015;Sun et al 2017;Thompson et al 2018;Olsen et al 2018), notably confirming that viewing metal as dysfunctional "problem music" is empirically untenable, implications for the general theory of musical emotions are, in our view, even greater. They shape a model of musical emotions which significantly extends the traditional view, in which the cortical and subcortical signals sent by affective and sensory systems (auditory thalami, auditory cortices) do not simply feed forward relatively unaltered to associative cortices (following e.g.…”

“…right temporal-frontal pathway of emotional prosody processing - Schirmer and Kotz 2006), but can also be thoroughly modified/inhibited by the circuits of higher-order cognition, to the point of creating emotional experiences (e.g. here, liking the music; in Thompson et al 2018, the experience of peace or joy) that appear to contradict the low-level cues that serve as input to these evaluations (e.g. here, auditory roughness).…”

“…In ecological situations, such sounds trigger stereotypical fear and avoidance behaviors (e.g., in conditioning paradigms - Den et al 2015), are strong prioritized in sensory processing (Asutay and Västfjäll 2017), and evoke activity in areas linked to the brain's threat response system (Arnal et al 2015). It is therefore no surprise that "extreme" music such as punk, hardcore or metal, whose vocal and instrumental characteristics share much acoustic similarity with threat signals, should evoke for a large proportion of listeners feelings of anger, tension and fear (Rea et al 2010;Blumstein et al 2012; Thompson et al 2018), impair their capacity to cope with simultaneous external stress (Labbé et al 2007) and trigger reactions of avoidance and a desire to stop listening (Bryson 1996;Thompson et al 2018). Decoding extreme music as an auditory signal of danger or threat, these listeners (as one respondent quoted in Thompson et al 2018) literally "[...] cannot understand how anyone finds this music pleasant to listen to".…”