People with depression feel better after listening to sad music, research suggests

People with depression listen to sad music because it makes them feel better, according to a small study that is one of the first to investigate why people turn to tearjerkers when they’re already down.

Then, the researchers gave the participants new clips of happy and sad instrumental music and asked them to describe how the tracks made them feel. Again, the depressed participants preferred the sad music, but they also stated that the sad music made them feel happier. “They actually were feeling better after listening to this sad music than they were before,” study co-author Jonathan Rottenberg told WUSF News. It seemed to have relaxing and calming effects. This challenges the assumption that sad people listen to sad music to make themselves feel worse, when, in fact, it may be a coping mechanism.

Of course, there are many limitations. This is a small study that only looked at female undergraduates, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt. (Psychology, in general, tends to use WEIRD — Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — subjects too often.) We don’t have a lot of detail regarding exactly why people with depression prefer sad music, and we don’t know how results might change with happy and sad music that has words.

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