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Personality and Uses of Music as Predictors of Preferences for Music Consensually Classified as Happy, Sad, Complex, and Social

Authors:
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
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Patrick Fagan
Patrick Fagan
Adrian Furnham at University of London
Adrian Furnham
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This study replicates the findings of a recent study (Chamorro-Premuzic, Gomà-i-Freixanet, Furnham, & Muro, 2009) on the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and everyday uses of music or people's motives for listening to music. In addition, it examined emotional intelligence as predictor of uses of music, and whether uses of music and personality traits predicted liking of music consensually classified as sad, happy, complex, or social. A total of 100 participants rated their preferences for 20 unfamiliar musical extracts that were played for a 30-s interval on a website and completed a measure of the Big Five personality traits. Openness predicted liking for complex music, and Extraversion predicted liking for happy music. Background use of music predicted preference for social and happy music, whereas emotional music use predicted preference for sad music. Finally, males tended to like sad music and use music for cognitive purposes more than females did. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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... A robust body of literature has documented the relationship between personality and music preference (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003;Vella & Mills, 2017); personality and music-evoked emotions (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2010;Silvia et al., 2015); music preference and music-evoked emotions (Schäfer & Sedlmeier, 2010); empathy and music-evoked emotions (Eerola et al., 2016). In recent years, there is increasing support for the role of absorption in aesthetic experience in general, which is extended to musical emotions as well. ...
A neurocognitive approach to understand the role of familiarity with musical style and individual differences in music-evoked emotions
Thesis
Full-text available
  • Oct 2021
Music is widely used for leisure, relaxation purposes in everyday life and in healthcare settings. While existing behavioral studies have mapped out basic relationships between musical features and emotions, it remains unclear why different individuals have similar or different emotional responses to music. This points towards a need to examine music-listener relationship, which could be examined by discussing underlying psychological mechanisms and considering an individual’s level of familiarity with a musical style on music-evoked emotions. Neuroimaging studies have also increasingly suggested the involvement of a widely distributed network of brain regions in music-evoked emotions, beyond the established indices of emotional processing (e.g., frontal alpha asymmetry). Moreover, the role of individual differences in music-evoked emotions, particularly absorption trait, are often either not systematically examined or considered in conjunction with neuropsychological processes. Therefore, this thesis aims to integrate perspectives from psychological sciences and neurocognitive sciences to clarify and examine individual variation in music-evoked emotions.
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... However, our results conflict with Qiu et al. (2019), who successfully related Emotional Stability to lyrics-based music preferences when only investigating participants' favorite songs, whose lyrics may be particularly meaningful compared to those of all played songs. While it seems reasonable that Emotional Stability may be connected to music listening (e.g., the emotionality of song lyrics), which is commonly used for emotion regulation, such relationships may vary intra-individually and be dependent on the emotional context of a music listening situation (i.e., the listener's mood; e.g., Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2010). ...
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Article
Full-text available
  • Jun 2023
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... Further, musical pieces in minor mode and slow tempo, hence with a sad connotation, tend to be more appreciated among listeners with high introversion and empathy, and low emotional stability (Ladinig & Schellenberg, 2012;Taruffi et al., 2017). In addition, high neuroticism levels are associated with stronger sad feelings in response to music and larger use of music to regulate mood and emotions (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2010;Ladinig & Schellenberg, 2012). Considering that neuroticism predicts both depression and anxiety disorders (Zinbarg et al., 2016), these results suggest that emotional distress might affect the preference and perception of major-minor modes. ...
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Preprint
Full-text available
  • Oct 2023
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... Peever, Johnson, and Gardner discovered another trait, extraversion, closely related to those who enjoyed the music genre [27,32]. Highly extroverted people are social, outgoing, and energetic, and they require higher levels of social interaction and movement, which is why they are more attracted to music games [34][35][36]. ...
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Article
Full-text available
  • Feb 2023
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... Based on previous studies, musical preferences were found to be influenced by the personality traits they possess. Creative, open-minded, and unconventional (openness) individuals were having novel and sophisticated musical preferences; extraverted and agreeable people preferred traditional and upbeat music whereas conscientious and neurotic individuals were likely to hear rebellious and intense music (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010;Dunn, 2012;Langmeyer, 2012). Neurotic individuals used music for managing emotions whereas conscientious people were not able to do so; openness to experience prevised cognitive music use, music is employed by extraverted individuals to avoid distraction or as background (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2009). ...
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Article
Full-text available
  • Feb 2023
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... Openness to experience as measured via the BFI is a composite of multiple dimensions [60], several of which have been associated with characteristics which could be linked to preferences for higher levels of musical complexity, such as 'aesthetic sensitivity', 'preference for variety', 'intellectual curiosity' and 'challenging authority'. This is supported by previous studies showing associations between openness to experience and listeners' preference for complex music in general [61] and changes in the shape of the inverted U in response to familiar music [34]. Musicians tend to score higher on openness to experience [31,32,[62][63][64], although this overall difference compared to non-musicians was not found in the present study. ...
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Full-text available
  • Jun 2024
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  • CAN J EXP PSYCHOL
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