Sorry, but your Drake obsession might not be good for you. Nor your penchant for listening to Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ on loop after a break-up.
A new study has found that listening to sad music could have long-term affects on our mental health.
According to new findings published in this month's Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal, those who listen to sad or aggressive music could be prone to higher anxiety and neuroticism levels than those who prefer more upbeat songs.
Participants were tested for their neural activity while listening to either happy, sad, or fearful sounding music. The results were then compared to signals of mental health, including depression, anxiety and neuroticism.
Elvira Brattico, the senior author of the study explains: “These results show a link between music listening styles and mPFC activation, which could mean that certain listening styles have long-term effects on the brain.”
“Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening,” added co-author and music therapist Emily Carlson. “[We hope our work] encourages everyone to think about the how the different ways they use music might help or harm their own well-being."
As it were - listening to that sad track on repeat could have a similar affect to replaying your real-life breakup in your head over and over. So if you’ve got a date with Ben & Jerry’s then you might want to rethink hitting play on your more emo-themed playlist.