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When Music Makes You Cry
What
emotion do most people feel when they are moved to tears by music?
.
Evoking emotion is the main point of music,
after all, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that songs can put a lump
in our throats. Music can calm or excite; it can motivate,
uniting worshipers in peace and devotion, or driving people into
battle with the sound of drum and bugle.
.
Crying is a complex human behavior that can accompany a variety of intense experiences. It can be provoked by grief, as at a funeral, but also by extreme happiness, as at a wedding. But helplessness, gratitude, and other subtle emotions can also provoke tears.
Many types of music
can move people to tears; blubbering in the balcony is iconic in
opera. The phenomenon of crying sparked by music is an interesting, but
little-studied behavior.
According to a new study,
whether music does or does not make you feel like crying reveals something
about your fundamental personality,
and the particular shade of emotion gripping you as you feel choked up is
different for different personality types.
Researchers
Katherine Cotter and Paul Silvia of the University of North Carolina, and
Kirill Fayn of the University of Sydney, collaborated on research to
investigate the emotions that people experience when music makes them feel
like crying.
Music can calm or
excite; it can motivate, uniting worshipers in peace and devotion, or
driving people into battle with the sound of drum and bugle.
Crying is a complex
human behavior that can accompany a variety of intense experiences. It can be
provoked by grief,
as at a funeral, but also by extreme happiness,
as at a wedding.
But
helplessness, gratitude,
and other subtle emotions can also provoke tears. What emotion do most
people feel when they are moved to tears by music?
The researchers
surveyed 892 adults to determine how many had experienced feeling like crying
while hearing music, and what emotion they were feeling at that moment.
The first finding
is that being moved to tears by music is not unusual; 89.8 percent of
the people in the study reported that they had experienced feeling like crying
by hearing music.
The participants
were asked to rank their emotional feelings accompanying that
response across a spectrum of 16 emotions, including euphoria, happiness,
awe, anxiousness, sadness, depression,
etc.
The researchers
found that people who had been moved to tears by music could be clearly
separated into two groups: those who felt sadness, and those who felt awe.
The majority (63
percent) reported feeling sad when music made them cry, and 36.7 percent
reported feeling awe.
The participants in
the study had been given a psychological
test to classify them according to five personality attributes
— neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness,
and conscientiousness.
When the
researchers sorted the data, they found that people who ranked high on the
neuroticism scale experienced sadness when they had been moved to tears by
music, and people who scored high in the openness to experience scale felt
like crying because the music provoked a profound sense of awe.
In Eva Cassidy’s
performance, the emotion evoked is definitely awe.
I feel awed by
experiencing the extraordinary talent of one person to deliver such a perfect
and moving performance — built from nothing other than her beautiful voice
and skillful is a live performance, and the tension of sustaining
perfection alone in the spotlight magnifies the stakes.
The song has become
a thread-worn children’s jingle from a lifetime of overuse, but here it is
transformed and soaring.
If the correlation
with personality traits is correct, I should not rank particularly high on the
neuroticism scale (thankfully). But I’m not so sure.
This
thought-provoking study is a good start, but it has some limitations. The
experimental group was comprised of college students, which may not adequately
reflect the population as a whole.
Also,
69.6 percent of the participants were female, and the possible effect
of gender was
not analyzed.
Another
consideration is that in relying upon each person’s recollection of a time in
the past when they had felt like crying while listening to music, the study
depends on self-reporting to be accurate.
But in my opinion,
there is another complication at work.
Human emotions are
complex. They don’t always fit like pegs into the slots that researchers
provide in their experimental designs.
I remember being
moved to tears while hearing Pete Seeger sing "We Shall Overcome," inspiring everyone in
the crowd to join in a united chorus of solidarity and determination.
The predominant
feeling I had at the time was sadness.
I was thinking of
all the people who had sung that song in the streets of this country over the
years in peaceful struggles to overcome racial and social injustice;
black-and-white images of the Governor of Alabama blocking the doorway of the
university, police dogs, fire hoses blasting protesters off their feet,
neighborhoods burning in summer riots, the horrors of a war in Southeast Asia
that ripped our country apart and challenged every young man of draft age to
confront their own morality and
mortality, to distinguish duty from deceit, and decide, betting their life,
about a war that was taking the lives of thousands and maiming thousands more —
and what for?
But it was not only
sadness that I felt as I listened to Seeger sing. It is possible to
experience both sadness and awe simultaneously.
I felt a
bittersweet mix of sadness and awe in seeing one man with the courage to stand
up against injustice.
Motivated to try to
make the world a better, more peaceful place, to inspire us to be better human
beings, and do it with the only thing he had — songs.
Music is powerful
stuff. As a biologist, I see tooth and nail everywhere in nature, because
unfortunately, violence is sometimes necessary for survival.
But amidst current events — such as the hurling of brutal threats to obliterate millions of people with thermonuclear weapons — perhaps what the world needs now is a few less bombs and a few more banjos.
Online:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-new-brain/201709/when-music-makes-you-cry
You might also like:
Music
From Across The Way
Andy
Williams
CLICK
HERE . . . to view complete playlist . . .
https://puricarechronicles.blogspot.com/2019/11/music-from-across-way-andy-williams.html
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