How Sad Music Makes You More Sensitive (and What You Can Do About It)

According to a new study, listening to sad music increases our feelings of empathy, compassion, and the desire to assist others.

Every civilization on the planet has music as an integral element of it. According to recent research, the ability to appreciate music is hardwired into our brains, indicating that music has served an evolutionary purpose.

While listening to music is enjoyable on its own, it appears to have the added benefit of increasing social bonding. Research reveals that listening to music increases our empathy for other people, prompting us to empathize with their emotions and care about their well-being as a result of our experiences. Music may also boost our ability to consider what another person is thinking and feeling, as well as to see things from their point of view—another facet of empathy that can help us build better connections.

The long-term benefits of being a music listener and/or participating in a music program as a youngster are the focus of many music studies today. But, can listening to music help us connect and sympathize with someone who is in the same room as us right now? A recent study sought to find out the answer.

60 university students were invited to participate in this study, and they were asked to watch multiple 15-second movies in which a person recounted an autobiographical experience. A somewhat commonplace occurrence, such as moving into a new apartment, was discussed in some situations, while other stories featured high emotional content, such as reminiscing about a horrific tragedy or the death of a loved one, were discussed in other instances.

Researchers played either "emotionally neutral" music (such as Hans Zimmer's "Redacted") or very sorrowful music (such as Dario Marianelli's "Farewell") in the background while the students watched these movies at random. Each video was followed by a discussion in which the students expressed their feelings, how much sympathy they felt for the individual in the video, and how much they wanted to assist that person. Also examined were their social reasoning abilities, specifically how well they grasped the point of view represented by the person in the video. All of these characteristics could indicate an empathetic connection.

The findings revealed that participants who saw the sad films felt greater melancholy themselves (demonstrating that they empathized with the other person's feelings) and more sympathy for the other person than those who watched the neutral movies—which was not a huge surprise. However, listening to sad music heightened the intensity of these empathetic responses, resulting in greater sympathy for and readiness to assist the individual depicted in the movie.

As main researcher Brennan McDonald of the Technical University of Dresden in Germany explains, "There appears to be a synergistic impact between having emotional background music playing and listening to an emotional narrative." We can boost our social sentiments through music, according to the researchers.

It did not appear that the music had any effect on the students' ability to reason about the other person's perspective and comprehend cognitively what they might be thinking or feeling at any point during the experiment. McDonald is baffled as to why this would be the case, given that previous study appears to contradict this. However, he argues that it makes reasonable that music may have a greater emotional impact on us than it does on us rationally.

The professor asserts that "music can elicit powerful, genuine emotional responses across the entire range of emotions we can experience—fear (fear), sadness (sadness), anger (anger), and joy (joy)." "Music can also alert people to the emotions of the environment in which they find themselves and assist them in dealing with social interactions," he says. "However, our ability to comprehend another's mental process does not appear to be altered by music in the same way that our emotions are."

What is the significance of knowing this information? One key reason is that music is a constant presence in our daily life and may have an impact on our feelings for other people. Certainly, films take advantage of this, according to McDonald, who describes music as a simple technique to increase people's empathy, causing them to care more about the well-being of their characters.

McDonald's ultimate goal with this research is to use music to improve compassion in a more general sense. While music is not the sole means of accomplishing this—other art forms, such as literature and dancing, have also been found to improve empathy, for example—music has the potential to be a very effective weapon. After all, this study just required participants to listen to 15 seconds of emotional music, and it still resulted in them feeling more compassion for others and a desire to assist them. Perhaps increasing the amount of time individuals spend listening to or playing music together might contribute to the development of a more caring society.

To investigate if music-making over a long period of time in a social situation might improve our real-world ability to empathize and feel compassion towards people over the long term, McDonald says, "it would be extremely intriguing to take our discovery and stretch it further." "The next natural step is to put that to the test."