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Good Question
Why Do You Like Sad Songs and Movies?
‘Poignant’ media may help us find answers to life’s big questions
On my 13th or 14th birthday, I can’t remember which, my dad gave me a boombox and some CDs.
The CDs were Neil Young’s Harvest, and greatest-hits collections from the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and the Steve Miller Band. He told me he’d picked these because they were some of his old favorites — part of the soundtrack of his life in the late 1960s and ’70s when he’d lived in Northern California and Oregon. Even before I’d listened to them, I liked them because he liked them.
I especially liked the Neil Young. It hooked me from the first plodding notes of its wistful opening track. That song, “Out on the Weekend,” has helped me through some stuff. Even now, I hear it and become that guy from Seinfeld — the one who gets a thousand-yard stare whenever he listens to “Desperado.”
Last year, while I was working on a piece about the psychological benefits of music, I read a study titled “Why Do Depressed People Prefer Sad Music?”
Published in the journal Emotion in 2020, the study replicated some older research that found people with major depressive disorder show a preference for music that reflects their mood. “Our results raise the question of why might depressed people be drawn to music that is sad and low energy?” the study’s authors wrote. “There can be two possible explanations.”
The first, they said, is that the sonic qualities of sad music may be calming — as in, sad music may reduce stress. “Sad and low energetic music tends to be flowing and have slow tempo… which might be appealing if depressed people seek calmness,” they wrote. The second explanation involved what they termed “emotional inertia.” People who feel sad may gravitate toward music that mirrors their emotional state — an impulse the study authors described as potentially “maladaptive” because it may reinforce or even increase a person’s sadness.
To my surprise, they did not explore the possibility that somber music may offer something deeper or more profound to a person in pain — or, for that matter, to a person not in pain. Throughout their paper, they treat a preference for…
