Study Links Music With Listeners' Emotions

Oct. 30 -- If you really want to get out of a foul mood, try listening to a little music.

A new study out of Penn State finds that music really can soothe the savage beast, up to a point, and it really doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to. As long as you like it.

"If you like music and choose to listen to it, it's probably going to make you feel better regardless of what type it is," says associate professor of psychology Valerie N. Stratton.

Stratton and associate music professor Annette H. Zalanowski, of Penn State's Altoona campus, teamed up to take music research out of the laboratory and put it in the real world in which we live. They wanted to see when people listen to music, what types of music they prefer, and what types of moods that music induces.

It turns out that most of us listen to it a lot, but usually when we're doing something else.

"We've been looking at music and behavior for quite a few years, and it finally struck us that most of the things we were doing, and most of the things that other people were doing, were within lab settings," says Stratton. "There was really very little out there that looked at how people listened to music in their daily lives."

So the researchers recruited 47 college students, including 25 music majors, and asked them to keep a diary for 14 days, noting the kinds of music they listened to. They were also asked to pick various moods from a list, showing their moods before, during and after listening to the music.

The Kids Like Rock

This is not exactly a startling finding, but the researchers found that college-age students overwhelmingly prefer to listen to rock music, whether hard, heavy or modern, and that includes music majors. If they weren't listing to hard rock, the non-music majors preferred country and soft rock. The music majors opted for classical and jazz after rock.