Individuals' favorite songs' lyrics reflect their attachment style

Abstract

AbstractRecent studies suggest that one's personality relates to their music preferences. Separately, research from an attachment theory perspective has demonstrated that attachment security and insecurity are important relationship‐related individual differences. We combined these two lines of inquiry here by investigating whether the lyrics of individuals' favorite songs about relationships reflect their attachment styles and related Big Five personality traits (Study 1; NParticipants = 469, NSongs = 4853). Individuals higher in attachment avoidance preferred relationship songs with lyrics expressing an avoidant attachment style, whereas individuals higher in neuroticism preferred relationship songs with lyrics expressing more attachment anxiety. We extended these results in a second study, finding that the lyrics of Western culture's 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015 mirrored societal trends of increasing social disengagement (i.e., were increasingly higher in attachment avoidance themes), suggesting that song lyrics impart psychological meaning at the sociocultural level as well. Our data therefore suggests that higher levels of attachment avoidance are reflected in preferred lyrics in relationship songs at both an individual and societal level.