An interesting study published in the magazine “Emotion,” confirmed an earlier study published in 2015 that when people are feeling sad they preferred to listen to sad music! The sample included 76 females students at the University of South Florida. Half of the students were diagnosed with depression.
The students were asked to listen to “happy” and “sad” classical music clips. The depressed participants preferred the sad music over the happy music. Interestingly enough, these students said that the sad music made them happier.
The hypothesis behind this finding is that the sad music had a calming and relaxing effect on the depressed students. It also challenges the assumption that sad music makes sad people sadder. Since the sample size was small, researchers may like to do a larger scale study in the future, but the results are very interesting!