How Does Music Affect One's Mood?
Everyone has a connection to music whether they listen to it much or not. It has become a very large part of our lives, and with new origins of music softwares coming out on the market by the thousands, it’s become an immense benefactor towards our culture. A study at the University of Missouri has found that music is more than just an enjoyable factor of life; it is also a large part of our health, and how our moods swing. Over the years, many studies have been conducted to examine in greater depth the nature and extent of the effects music has on people.
It shows that listening to the kind of music related to the emotions you are having, usually boosts and strengthens those feelings. Most have shown after hearing a short piece of music, participants were more likely to interpret a neutral expression as happy or sad, to match the tone of the music they heard throughout the experiments. During the experiments they came up with a theory that there are two kinds of emotions related to music: perceived emotions and felt emotions. This saying, sometimes we can understand the emotions of a piece of music without actually feeling them, which explains why some of us find listening to sad music enjoyable, rather than depressing. Different music genres, affect different portions of the brain, forwarding the emotions within.
• Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease. • Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, and at ease. • Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert, and at ease. • Rap fans have high self-esteem, and are outgoing. • Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative, and gentle. • Country and western fans are hardworking, and outgoing.
• Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle, and at ease. • Dance fans are creative and outgoing, but not gentle. • Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle. • Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease. • Pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease.
• Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease. When you listen to music you enjoy, levels of dopamine in your body were found to be up to 9% higher. Dopamine is a chemical in your body, known to produce a feel-good state in response to certain pleasures, from eating sweets to taking cocaine. The chills one gets from listening to certain music, is caused by the dopamine levels within your body rising to maximum pleasure.Daniel Levitin, a psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal, did multiple studies over the topic of music within the brain.
“In one study reviewed, researchers studied patients who were about to undergo surgery. Participants were randomly assigned to either listen to music or take anti-anxiety drugs. Scientists tracked patient’s ratings of their own anxiety, as well as the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The results: The patients who listened to music had less anxiety and lower cortisol than people who took drugs. Levitin cautioned that this is only one study, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results, but it points toward a powerful medicinal use for music.” (Landau, Elizabeth) Levitin stated, “The promise here is that music is arguably less expensive than drugs, and it’s easier on the body and it doesn’t have side effects.
” Many studies have investigated the effect of music on our emotions and happiness. When this connection between music and happiness is understood, it can predict which songs will make you happy, and explain why certain music already does. When you’re in a happy or giddy mood, you tend to choose happy, cheerful, joyous songs, over those of harsh, grungy, violent song genres. Although, sad music educes a similar, almost cloned; sense of happiness. Music that is perceived as sad actually induces romantic emotions as well as sad emotions.
Unlike sadness in daily life, sadness experienced through art actually feels pleasant, possibly because the artistic forms do not pose an actual threat to our safety. And people, regardless of their musical taste, experience these conflicting emotions whilst listening to sad music. This could help people to deal with their negative emotions in daily life, rather than the belief that sad is sad, and happy is happy; when really music is a form of art, and art is simply an expression. Music is a vast opening to our surroundings. There is never a moment it isn’t with us.
The ways it affects us, from changing our emotions to affecting our mood; is still being driven to find the roots as to why music is such a large part of our body’s anatomy. The powers from the science of music are a form of therapy we have only just begun to perceive.
