Sad songs can really cause pleasant emotions

If you ever have managed like crying listening to "Fix You" by Coldplay (just us?), new research can have an explanation why.

Scientists at Tokyo University of the arts and the Institute of Brain Science RIKEN in Japan found that listening to sad music reality can trigger positive emotions. He explained that sadness has skyrocketed since art is not the same type of sadness caused by an actual sad event and in fact it could actually feel welcome.

"Emotion experienced by the music has no direct danger or damage in contrast to the excitement experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotions such as sadness, "wrote the researchers in the study. "If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through everyday life, sad music could be useful to relieve the negative emotion".

The small new study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, including 44 people, some of whom were musicians and some who had no special training in music. The study participants listened to a happy piece of music - Granados Allegro de concert in g major - in major and minor keys, in order to combat the "happy effect" songs composed in major keys tend to have. They also heard from two pieces "sad" music, "Separation" of Glinka in f minor étude de Blumenfeld "Sur Mer" in g minor.

The researchers had the study participants rate 62 different emotion-related words and phrases when they heard the different pieces of music, based on the emotions that are perceived in the music, as well as the emotions that felt when listening to music.

In fact, a discrepancy was found between perceived emotions and the emotions that I felt listening to sad music. Perceived emotions were the saddest and most tragic, while real emotions felt were more romantic and less tragic.

Earlier this month, HuffPost women reported on an upcoming finding in the Journal of Consumer Research, showing that sad or angry music prefer to listen after a negative experience that a person (such as a break-up). HuffPost women reported:

The researchers found that when the negative situation another person - as in a break, for example - participants strongly preferred a friend empathetic and sad music. Two further experiments confirmed that the participants experience emotional distress related to other people were much more likely to prefer sad music experienced the anguish of non-issues with other people. As you probably don't want surrounded by cheerful people when your heart is broken, they don't want to listen to Selena Gomez saying that "come and get it".

For an explanation of what sad songs can make us cry, click on HuffPost & culture.

You are a fan of the sad music, or prefer more optimistic melodies? Tell us in the comments!

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