Abstract

Why do we enjoy listening to music that makes us sad? This question has puzzled music psychologists for decades, but the paradox of “pleasurable sadness” remains to be solved. Recent findings from a study investigating the enjoyment of sad films suggest that the positive relationship between felt sadness and enjoyment might be explained by feelings of being moved (Hanich et al., 2014). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether feelings of being moved also mediated the enjoyment of sad music. In Experiment 1, 308 participants listened to five sad music excerpts and rated their liking and felt emotions. A multilevel mediation analysis revealed that the initial positive relationship between liking and felt sadness (r = 0.22) was fully mediated by feelings of being moved. Experiment 2 explored the interconnections of perceived sadness, beauty, and movingness in 27 short music excerpts that represented independently varying levels of sadness and beauty. Two multilevel mediation analyses were carried out to test competing hypotheses: (A) that movingness mediates the effect of perceived sadness on liking, or (B) that perceived beauty mediates the effect of sadness on liking. Stronger support was obtained for Hypothesis A. Our findings suggest that – similarly to the enjoyment of sad films – the aesthetic appreciation of sad music is mediated by being moved. We argue that felt sadness may contribute to the enjoyment of sad music by intensifying feelings of being moved.

Highlights

  • Why do people sometimes enjoy listening to music that makes them sad? The paradox of “pleasurable sadness” has attracted significant research interest among music psychology scholars in recent years, but the puzzle remains to be solved

  • Huron (2011) has further extended the idea that musicinduced sadness is disconnected from the negative real-word implications and displeasure that are typically associated with experiences of sadness, and proposed that the pleasure sometimes experienced while listening to sad music might be related to the adaptive, consoling physiological responses triggered by a sad affective state

  • The mean ratings of liking, felt sadness and being moved given to the five music excerpts are displayed in Figure 1, demonstrating the variability of the felt emotions and liking responses evoked by the different stimuli

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Summary

Introduction

Why do people sometimes enjoy listening to music that makes them sad? The paradox of “pleasurable sadness” has attracted significant research interest among music psychology scholars in recent years (for a review, see Sachs et al, 2015), but the puzzle remains to be solved. Huron (2011) has further extended the idea that musicinduced sadness is disconnected from the negative real-word implications and displeasure that are typically associated with experiences of sadness, and proposed that the pleasure sometimes experienced while listening to sad music might be related to the adaptive, consoling physiological responses (such as the release of prolactin) triggered by a sad affective state While this account fits together nicely with empirical findings linking greater intensity of felt sadness with greater enjoyment (e.g., Vuoskoski et al, 2012; Eerola et al, 2016), direct empirical evidence for the potential role of prolactin and other hormones is currently still lacking. Juslin (2013) has criticized the fact that the proposed prolactin/consolation effect is an ‘after-effect’ rather than a pleasurable experience of listening to sadness-inducing music, and that in this account “there is no ‘pleasurable sadness,’ there is only pleasure following sadness” (Juslin, 2013; p. 258)

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