By Anna Samson, BBC Music Magazine – August 16, 2022

A study suggests that listening to sad music when you’re feeling down doesn’t make you feel worse but actually improves your mood.

The study, carried out by scientists from the University of Berlin, asked participants to name the emotions they have experienced when listening to sad music from a given list of feelings, which includes ‘nostalgia’, ‘sadness’, ‘wonder’ and ‘power’.

The most common feeling described was ‘nostalgia’, followed by ‘peacefulness’ and ‘tenderness’. These feelings belong to the emotional category ‘sublime’ rather than ‘unease’, which is the group that ‘sadness’ is placed in.

The research also indicated that many people feel they gain specific emotional rewards through listening to sad music. These rewards include imagination, empathy, and emotional regulation (the ability to recognize and respond effectively to various emotional states). This could explain why the study found that people are more likely to listen to sad music when already feeling sad.

As well as responding to the given music, participants were asked to name the compositions they considered to be sad. Among the most popular responses were Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Mahler’s Symphony No.5 and Purcell’s Dido’s Lament.