If you’re wondering why the moody ballads are striking a chord for you right now, mental health experts may have the answer. “Listening to music that evokes an emotional response is cathartic,” says Arianna Galligher, a licensed independent social worker with supervision designation and an associate director of the STAR Trauma Recovery Center at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. “It helps us access and move through emotions that can otherwise be difficult or painful, in a low-risk, intentional, and time-limited way.” RELATED: Tips for Building and Cultivating Your Resilience Adele’s and Swift’s albums join a long line of breakup records, from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours to the Cure’s Disintegration to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak. For Galligher, replaying “Dead Man’s Will” by Iron and Wine and Calexico helped her process the unexpected loss of her mother in 2019. “It’s a song about passing ownership of trivial but intensely sentimental items steeped in memory, to the people that would cherish them the most,” Galligher says. Sad music may give people a socially acceptable way to explore difficult emotions that they’ve been socialized to avoid or keep to themselves, she says. “The reality is that avoiding emotions doesn’t make them vanish, and we all need and deserve an outlet. … Sad music can also reinforce that a person is not alone in their experiences.” RELATED: What a Body Positivity Expert Wants You to Know About Adele’s 100-Plus-Pound Weight Loss
What the Science Says About Using Music to Explore Difficult Emotions
Research indeed suggests people turn to music to help cope with difficult emotions. One previous study, for example, found that people were more apt to select angry songs after a frustrating social interaction and more likely to choose mournful tunes after a bad breakup. For a study published in June 2020 in the journal Emotion, researchers had people who had been previously diagnosed with depression listen to different types of classical music and found the participants overwhelmingly preferred sad music to more upbeat sounds because they found it relaxing. The researchers concluded that the less upbeat tunes were calming for people with depression because they better matched their energy levels. A review of evidence published in November 2017 by Cochrane analyzed data from nine previous studies including more than 400 people with depression and found that adding music therapy to other treatment for depression (like medication and talk therapy) helped the individuals manage depressive symptoms and improve functioning when it came to things like work, relationships, and other activities. RELATED: Music Therapy Helps Relieve Anxiety, Depression, and Stress Symptoms
So Why Do We Still Like Sad Music When We’re Not in the Dumps?
Matthew E. Sachs, PhD, is a neuroscience and psychology researcher at Columbia University in New York City whose work focuses on understanding the neural and behavioral mechanisms involved in emotions and feeling in response to music and film. Not surprisingly, he says that music evokes different responses in different people at different times. Sometimes sad music helps us break through feelings of numbness by bringing up those strong emotions, he explains. Sometimes sadness summoned by music can help people get in touch with clearer, more rational thinking because it makes them feel reflective in the absence of any real-life tragic events, he adds. Research (including some from Sachs’s group) suggests people with a strong sense of empathy are drawn to sad songs. Sachs’s work has asked people to rate the intensity of any sadness or enjoyment felt while hearing sad songs in order to map those feelings to regions of the brain activated while they listened. Subjects who expressed the most enjoyment had more activation in the regions of the brain that control memory, executive function, and empathy, according to results published in September 2020 in the journal NeuroImage. Other research has found that melancholy tunes can fire up the parts of our brain that control our imagination and regulate our emotions (again, including empathy). “One strong indicator of whether a person enjoys sad music is the degree to which we understand and relate to the emotions of others,” Sachs says.
