Listening to sad music is believed to induce depressive realism, encouraging more realistic assessments of the likelihood of certain outcomes.ĭifferent people experience sadness differently, and some people are more susceptible to sadness than others. Compared with happiness, sadness has been observed to encourage more detail-oriented thinking and less judgment bias in people. This is due to a phenomenon called depressive realism. One might suppose that people become pessimistic when they’re sad however, one research study proves that people are actually more realistic when they’re sad. Certain kinds of sad music help this process of thinking over past events, resolving issues and reaching positive conclusions about them. Sad music also allows people to reflect on important negative life events and make sense of them, even though the listener may experience some sadness while listening. Many people listen to sad music just to cry and release their bottled-up emotions, even when they aren’t feeling particularly sad about anything.
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Even if the listener feels sad after listening to a sad song, he is aware that he’s merely listening to music and that the sadness he feels does not warrant the full negative impact of a true tragedy. However, without any actual feelings of sadness, the effect produced by prolactin would simply result in a notably pleasant state. When we listen to sad music, we’re essentially ‘tricking’ our brains into thinking that something sad has happened, thus causing a spike in prolactin. When you are in a state of grief, prolactin produces feelings of tranquility, calmness and consolation, thus preventing the grief state from escalating uncontrollably. It is released, both in males and females, in response to grief, sadness or other forms of stress to attenuate the pain through its analgesic effect. Apart from its connection to lactation, prolactin also has various psychological effects. Prolactin: Tricking the brainĪnother reason people enjoy sad music is because of the hormone prolactin. It offers no direct danger or harm-unlike the actual emotion of sadness experienced in everyday life-which allows listeners to enjoy an unpleasant emotion like sadness. Sad music, unlike the situation of actually being sad, comes with a sort of romanticism, which poses no immediate threat. They simply enjoy the emotional arousal that sad music evokes. It also found that the people who scored high for the trait of empathy most appreciated and enjoyed the beauty of sad music. One study found that sad music evoked, in addition to sadness, a range of positively toned aesthetic emotions. Most people who enjoy sad music would say that it’s more ‘moving’ than any other form of music. Just because a song expresses happiness doesn’t mean that people will always want to listen to it. Happy music, by itself, is often trite and boring. Why would anyone want to risk messing up a perfectly good mood by listening to something gloomy? Sad music is ‘moving’ This is surprising, given the nature of music.
Many people prefer sad music even when they’re not particularly upset. Why do we enjoy sad music even when we’re not sad? This is because, while sad music comes across as an empathic person trying to console you, happy music may instead seem like a perky person telling you to smile when you’re annoyed. Listening to happy music seems like a normal thing to do when you want a distraction from the sadness inside yourself, but why doesn’t it always work? More often than not, you end up feeling worse than before! Why do we hate listening to happy music when we’re sad? Aristotle, in fact, actually suggested catharsis as an explanation for people’s enjoyment of tragic art. Listening to sad music is believed to facilitate catharsis from negative emotions. In other words, it allows listeners to bring their own negative emotions to the surface and vent them out, thereby reducing tension and stress. Sad music resonates well with a wounded heart (Photo Credit : PowerUp/Shutterstock)