Many people have certain songs for different moments in life. One helps them get through a workout. Another makes a long trip more enjoyable. And a third is reserved for those days when nothing else seems to work. It often feels as though music itself generates these emotions.
However, favorite songs frequently resist definition and don’t evoke any single set of feelings. The same track can simultaneously bring a sense of comfort and bitterness, nostalgia and hope.
New research suggests this happens because emotional experiences depend less on the song itself and more on why we chose to play it. The study’s findings were published in the Journal of Research in Personality.
For years, researchers gave people a list and asked them to name the emotion a song stirred in them. Was it joyful or sad? Calming or tense?
This model failed to capture the real situation in which people listen to music.
A team of researchers led by Margarida Baltazar from the University of Jyväskylä set out to measure emotional complexity. This involves experiencing both good and bad feelings at once, such as joy intertwined with sadness.
“We wanted to gain a more complete understanding of people’s experiences with music,” Baltazar said.
The goal was breadth rather than brevity, which meant one song could convey both joy and sadness simultaneously. Such mixed emotions occur far more often than older surveys indicated. A beloved song can bring both comfort and pain, and this feeling cannot be captured by a single item on a questionnaire.
The team gathered responses from over 2,100 people across 84 countries, representing different languages, age groups, and vastly different musical worlds. Each person chose one song that held special significance for them.
Then came the evaluations. For that single track, participants noted how strongly it evoked love, happiness, and calmness alongside sadness, pain, and loneliness. The same song could score high on both sets of emotions at once.
Beyond the song itself, the survey recorded how often people turned to music—whether to reminisce about old times, soothe a bad mood, or find a sense of self-worth. It also reflected personality traits and outlooks on life.
One pattern stood out above the rest. The strongest signal was not the song or even the listener’s mood that day. It was the reason the person picked up the music in the first place.
As the researchers noted, when people used a song to fully experience its emotions, relive personal memories, or express themselves, tangled feelings emerged more frequently.
Such activities prompt a person to turn inward, to seek meaning rather than manage mood.
The opposite occurs with self-regulation, the habit of using music to improve or stabilize one’s state of mind. If you play a song to calm down or overcome a slump, the emotional effect is far simpler.
This distinction reveals what older studies missed for years. Music chosen to manage feelings narrows them. But when you focus on a specific feeling, it opens up. It seems that how music is used, not the playlist itself, determines the emotional range.
Age clearly played a major role. Younger listeners reported the richest intertwining of emotions, and this effect gradually weakened with age. Something tied to youth or how young people use music sustains these contradictions.
Listeners’ personality traits divided them in a similar way. People whose emotions are strong and quick to shift, as well as those who prefer spontaneity over routine, reported more mixed feelings. More balanced and organized individuals reported fewer emotions. Research on nostalgic songs revealed a similar pattern.
None of this means that older or more settled people get less enjoyment from music. It simply means they tend toward purer feelings—one clear emotion rather than several conflicting ones.
The greatest diversity appeared among younger listeners and emotionally restless individuals.
People’s backgrounds also influenced the picture, though not in the most obvious way. A competitive, achievement-oriented culture that values independence, personal success, and the idea that some will come out ahead was linked to more mixed emotions.
This cultural link did not arise on its own—at least not directly. It was entirely determined by how those people used music, relying on songs to revive memories and fully experience their emotions. After accounting for these habits, the cultural effect disappeared entirely.
The difference between cultures was not about culture at all, but about listening styles—a finding that aligns with broader research on culture and musical sensations.
“These people more often used music to express their identity, revive personal memories, and fully experience the emotions tied to the music, which in turn could lead to richer and more complex emotional experiences,” Baltazar said.
Notably, it is the way a song is used, rather than the song itself, that often tips the balance between one feeling and many others. This challenges the old assumption that music simply delivers an emotion to a passive listener.
This opens up practical possibilities. Music therapists could tailor sessions to specific goals, since a song meant to express grief works differently from one designed to lift the mood.
Streaming services might focus less on genre and more on why people hit the play button. Researchers could also explore how lyrics, melody, and personal memories combine to evoke both joy and homesickness in a person at the same time.
The era of single-expression emotions in music is coming to an end, making way for something far richer.
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