Nicole Juarez

ENC 2135
Professor Boudreau
Do Break-Up Songs play with your Emotions?
You just ran out of a Cold Stone ice cream shop. Your makeup is running as
tears are pouring down your face. How can Jimmy just dump you over ice cream?
What kind of guy does that? When you get to your car, the first thing you do is turn
on the radio. And its just your luck as Adeles, When We Were Young, comes on
through the speakers. So you proceed to turn up the volume and belch out an off
key sobbing version of the famous hit. When the song finishes, life seems bearable
for a minute or two. You feel like Adele really knew what you were feeling inside.
How did she know about Jimmy being a big fat jerk? Surprise! Adele doesnt know
who Jimmy is and probably never will. But your mood is affected when you listen to
music; break up songs to be exact in this particular case. Music has a direct
correlation on your mood; it can bring you up or tear you down. Either way, it makes
more bearable sometimes by giving your brain temporary pleasure and release of
stress.
Music has been impacting us for way longer than we believe. According to
Psych Central, when we are born, the whole world we know is just a blur of colors
and sounds. We are already perceiving the sounds because of the frontal lobe of our
brain. The frontal lobe determines if the sounds are harmful to us, and when it is
determined that they are not a threat, the brain switches to stimulate the sound as
pleasure, (Mohana, 2016). So as we grow to learn words and eventually learn what a
song is and what they do, our brain is still stimulating that pleasure. The brain
begins to anticipate the next beat in a song subconsciously, which makes us groove.
This is why sometimes we dont realize we are tapping our foot or bobbing our head

to music. Through grooving to music, we open a sort of path in our brain that
expects to hear the music and then react to it emotionally. Humans have been
reacting to music since the dawn of time, and there is a study that has recorded this
happening since 1915. The British Medical Journal found that music has the power
to evoke memories. Memories therefore in turn trigger certain emotions based upon
what a person associates with a specific song. Because of this, researchers found
that when participants listened to music and began to invoke these memories, their
moods changed. Some people became upset and had a negative association while
others become happy and had a positive association.

Works Cited
Mohana, Malini. "Music & How It Impacts Your Brain, Emotions." Psych Central.
Psych Central, 17 July 2016. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.
<http://psychcentral.com/lib/music-how-it-impacts-your-brain-emotions/>.
Eerola, Tuomas. "Memorable Experiences with Sad MusicReasons, Reactions and
Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences." Academic Search Complete
[EBSCO]. N.p., 14 June 2016. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.
The British Medical Journal. "Music, Emotion, And Mutism." The British Medical
Journal 2.2867 (1915): 866. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2016.
Kawakami, Ai. "Sad Music Induces Pleasant Emotion." (2013): n. pag. PsychINFO.
Web. 01 Oct. 2016.