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Finnish researchers conducted a quirky sort of experiment with 102 volunteers. They had them listen to an unfamiliar piece of sad instrumental music and then evaluated their emotional responses in different ways, including measuring the variation between heartbeats. The researchers categorized three broad types of response — a relaxed, peaceful sadness; an anxious, nervous sadness; and an intense, almost transcendental sadness. They also discovered a pattern: Those who had higher levels of empathy were more likely to experience the intense type of sadness, while there were no clear relationship with the other types.
"It has previously been known that people experience paradoxical pleasure when engaging with tragic art, but this seems to be more pronounced in those who have a heightened ability to engage with other people's emotions,"said the study's lead author Dr. Tuomas Eerola, currently a professor of music cognition at Durham University in England, in a statement. "Conversely, people with low empathy do not report feeling moved after listening to sad music."
Eerola and his colleagues took pains to eliminate any other causes for the volunteers' reactions by measuring their baseline heartbeats, blood pressure, and other factors that could influence their heart's reaction to the music.
"By using unfamiliar, instrumental sad music in our experiment, we were able to rule out most other possible sources of emotion such as specific memories and lyrics." explained study co-author Jonna Vuoskoski from the University of Oxford. "Thus, participants' emotional responses must have been brought about by the music itself."
Comment: See also: Musical preferences linked to cognitive processes