Cansu Ozduzen ENGL 1102 Professor Thomas April 28, 2014 Thesis (Final) My Friend of Misery It all starts

from eight octaves and music takes everyone on a different journey. When people are asked, they all answer the typical What kind of music do you listen question differently. Some say its Hip-Hop, some say its Country or people like me say its mostly Rock. But do we ever ask each other Why do you listen to sad songs when youre sad or vice-versa. Before writing this Thesis, I asked some of my friends if they listen to music that is congruent or incongruent to their mood. Most of them told me that they never thought about music that way. Some said they just like listening to sad music, because its mellow. It seemed as if people never really gave this a thought and people who actually thought about it said that they listen to music that is congruent to their mood. But knowing that I am a psychology major who is very interested in music studies, those people asked me to get an answer. I want my thesis to be an answer to those people who are confused about this matter, who are seeking for answer, and to those people who never really thought about it, but they just like music. Researchers at Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan set out to answer a similar question in a recent study published online. They posed the question, "why do we listen to sad music if it evokes sadness?"I think its a good question to

think about because why do we listen to sad music, if all it does is to torture us and make us miserable. This study showed that even though that type of music sounds miserable and almost torturous, listening to it doesnt make us feel that way, in contrast it makes us feel the opposite. They proved this point by dividing musical emotion into perceived emotion and felt emotion. They concluded that sad music would be perceived as sad, but the experience of listening to sad music would evoke positive emotions. The results revealed that although sad music was perceived to be more tragic, listening to sad music actually induced participants to feel more romantic, blither, and less tragic. With this study, I got answers to my What kind of emotions does sad music evoke? but it failed to answer the why aspect of it. Before reading about the study, I thought the reason why people choose sad music when theyre feeling down was because people like to listen to others sadness, in other words misery loves company. Most people like to share their problems, so I thought people would listen to miserable songs because theyd like to know that other people have it tough too, not just them. But after reading this study in detail- I even did a small experiment on myself listening to the songs that they used in the research and answering the questions they asked the participants- I agreed with the psychologists on how sad music makes people feel romantic, blither, and less tragic. When I did the experiment on myself, in addition to those three emotions, I felt inspired and passionate. I couldnt quite call the songs sad or happy, it was in between, maybe this was what researches wanted participants to think. The mood of music can be a very confusing subject, because how do we decide if a song is sad or happy. Its easier to decide when the lyrics are involved, but when its only instrumental, it gets tricky. I think the most interesting thing about this study is that they paid extra attention to whether participants heard those songs before, and they avoided well-known pieces. The reason

behind this is because if they used well-known music, then there would be possibility that some participants have had personal memories connected with this music, and the felt emotion would be affected by those memories. By choosing unknown pieces, they succeeded to capture felt emotion as resulting from the music alone, without the touch of personal memories. In contradiction to the study, I linked sad music to personal memories when I started thinking about the relationship between mood and music. For example, in my inquiry proposal I talked about the different strategies that make people adopt music, like memory trigger and desire of connection. These strategies are directly linked to the memories and personal experiences. People who are sad might listen to sad songs that remind them of memories and still feel romantic and inspired but that is irrelevant to the study. If you put peoples own experiences, emotions, their personal relationships, and memories, the research gets more subjective and it becomes almost impossible to get results. All I could do was to talk about different personal reasons but I failed to come up with general things. One of the most important rules about psychological research is to keep it professional and objective, otherwise youll end up with grey areas and no accurate results. Another study, Misery Loves Company: Mood-Congruent Emotional Responding to Music which was done by Patrick G. Hunter, E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Andrew T. Griffith, professors at University of Toronto, demonstrated that mood has a strong effect on the kind of aspects people primarily focus on and they tend to search for congruent cues with their moods. For example, if theyre sad, they usually focus on the minor mode, the slow tempo. In contrast, when theyre happy, they focus on the opposite, the major mode and the high tempo. One thing I find interesting about this study is that based on the styles of their music listening, they categorized people as music systemizers and music empathizers. Music systemizers tend to focus

on music as an object, whereas music empathizers process music as emotional communication. I see myself as a music empathizer, because when I listen to music, it is so much more than just an object, it is an on-going communication, it is that musician feels the way I do. For example, if I send you a song out of the blue, its usually not because I liked the tune and wanted you to listen, it means I thought of you when I listened to this, the lyrics remind me of you. Before reading about this study, I never thought about categorizing people, but now it makes so much sense. When talking about reasons why people choose certain types of music, we have to take differences in people into account. We cannot discuss the reasons behind the different reasons why people choose certain moods of music without taking how they see music into consideration. Misery Loves Company supports the thesis of the Japanese research Sad Music Induces Pleasant Emotion but also adds another discussion about the different styles of music listening. The Japanese study concluded that the experience of listening to sad music evokes positive emotions and the Misery Loves Company study brings out the congruent cues behind music listening. When talking about the relationship between mood and music, we can focus on the different age groups and how they choose the different types of music. For example emerging adults between the ages 18 and 25 listen to what their peers listen to, and it is usually drastically different from what older people listen to. The age group I want to focus on is teenagers because we discussed Cultural Beliefs, Family Relations, Sexuality and Gender of teenagers in my Adolescent Psychology class, and knowing these things makes it easier for me to understand teenagers motives and styles. Also, from all the age groups, teenagers spend most time listening to music and experiencing different types of it, and that makes them a perfect fit for my subject.

Katrina McFerran, Lucy OGrady, Denise Grocke and Susan M. Sawyer, music therapists from the University of Melbourne, Australia did a study called How teenagers use music to manage their mood: An initial investigation. One of the many interesting findings is that certain music preferences are suggestive of vulnerability to mental health problems (Scheel and Westefeld). The research discusses that listeners of Heavy Metal and Goth music are most likely to go through depression or commit suicide. This conclusion makes me wonder if those music preferences make people vulnerable to mental problems, or people with mental problems usually listen to those types of music. Most of the young people in the study perceived themselves as successfully managing their moods through music listening. They listened more when they were happy or bored, supporting the premise that the most common use of music is for pleasure or distraction (Saarikallio and Erkkila 2007). Teenagers had to answers questions about how music affects their mood and the teenagers at high risk of psychological distress reported that the highest percentage of worse moods after listening to music and the lowest percentage of improved moods after listening to music. In my early teenager years, I listened to Pop and Hip Hop but then in my mid-teenager years I became a heavy-metal listener wearing black clothes only, and finally, the late-teenager me started listening to Alternative and Classic Rock. The experience of music during teenage years requires a lot of exploring till you reach that variety that you like. The study also showed that teenagers who listen to a wide range of music genres know how to manage their mood better and they have a lower risk of distress than the teenagers who listen to one genre only. It makes sense because teenager years are about explorations and self-identity and with the technology we have nowadays, teenagers are able to have access to a wide and diverse range of music genres. Teenagers mostly want to become aware that their core selves are attempting to emerge and reconnect. They listen to music because they enjoy the

feelings it brings and that is a way to relieve depressive moods. We can tie this study with the Japanese study saying that experience of music listening bring positive emotions. The researches usually contradict with each other but I tried to find the ones that support each other because all the contradictions direct us nowhere and were just stuck with millions of different opinions. Another study that supports my thesis is called Re-Exploring the Influence of Sad Mood on Music Preference done by Ronald S Friedman, Elena Gordis, and Jens Frster, who psychology professors from University of Albany, and University of Amsterdam. The study suggests that when we are sad, we dont necessarily choose feel-good music to make ourselves feel better, but in contrast, we choose sad music because we think thats more appropriate. Its like the misery loves company analogy, where its more acceptable for us to hang out with people that are down, when we are down. We do not want cheerful and happy people when we are sad, we want to see that other people are just as miserable as we are. This study ties with everything I talked about before. For example, the reason why teenagers try to explore and take their time listening to various genres and find the ones that they like is because they want whats appropriate for them. ` Even though there has been hundreds of researches concerning the link between mood

and music, we can never point out that this is the reason or that is the reason because there are so much that we do not know about the brain. The human brain is the most complex thing and all these recent studies can only give us a sense of understanding because of that complexity.

Works Cited

Okanoya, K., Katahira K., Furukawa K., Kawakami, A. Sad music induces pleasant emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, 2013.

Hunter, P. G., Schellenberg, E., & Griffith, A. T. (2011). Misery loves company: Moodcongruent emotional responding to music. Emotion, 11(5), 1068-1072.

McFerran, K., OGrady L., Sawyer, S.M. and Grocke, D.E. (unpublished) How teenagers use music to manage their mood: an initial investigation. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne.

Friedman R, Gordis E, Frster J. Re-Exploring the Influence of Sad Mood on Music Preference. Media Psychology [serial online]. July 2012;15(3):249-266.