Can “sad” music make people happy? I’m confused…

Scientists are intrigued by the fact that we can love a song even if it makes us sad.

Researchers have previously found that sad music can move people emotionally in a positive way, perhaps by experiencing empathy or appreciating the artistry of a piece. Now a study published April 10 in PLOS ONE finds that people may simply find pleasure in feeling the sadness that such music evokes.

“As humans, we can’t accept that there’s some weird sense of pleasure in negative emotions,” says Emery Schubert of the University of New South Wales in Australia. “But if someone says, ‘I like this song because it makes me sad,’ who’s to say they’re wrong?”

Schubert asked 50 people, mostly undergraduate music students, to think about a piece of music they liked but considered sad, including works by Ludwig van Beethoven and Taylor Swift. They then answered an online questionnaire about the emotions they felt while listening to the piece.

Next, participants were asked to try to imagine that the sadness in their chosen music could somehow be removed. Overall, participants said this made them like the piece less, with 82% saying the sadness increased their happiness.

In another part of the experiment, Schubert asked another 53 people, also undergraduate music students, to pick a song they liked and found "moving." These participants generally said that despite appreciating the song, they felt sad while listening to it.

Schubert said participants may have mixed the emotions of "sad" and "touched" together, thus experiencing a direct link between sadness and overall happiness. They may even have used "sad" and "touched" to describe the same or a closely related feeling.

But Jonna Vuoskoski at the University of Oslo in Norway says that if listeners can relate to the sadness, the artist's expression of it can trigger emotions that move them. People may also relate to the lyrics of sad songs, which can help them feel less alone when they're going through something and prevent them from suppressing their emotions.

Tuomas Eerola of Durham University in the UK doubts that people can remove sadness from a song that is generally considered sad. "The whole research is based on the assumption that listeners are able to perfectly analyse the reasons for their emotions towards the music they love."

Wang Fang