The Nuance
Why Listening to Sad Music Makes You Feel Better
There’s science behind the coping benefits of melancholy art
In a 2018 tweet, country music star Reba McEntire said that, for her, singing sad songs “has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.”
McEntire’s words touch on a paradox that psychology researchers have called “one of the most intriguing questions in the history of music scholarship.” Namely, why do people enjoy sad music? From Beethoven to the Beatles, many of the world’s most beloved tunes are somber. And this phenomenon is not confined to music; people have a special affection for sad movies, sorrowful literature, and other forms of melancholy artistic expression.
But why? Studies on what some researchers call “pleasurable sadness” suggest that different people enjoy sad art for different reasons. “One central mechanism that has been highlighted in multiple recent studies involves feelings of being moved or touched,” says Jonna Vuoskoski, an associate professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo in Norway.
Some of Vuoskoski’s research finds that people with high levels of empathy tend to be the most moved by sad music or films, and that this sentiment…
