Neuroscientist & Author

When Music Makes You Cry

Ever find yourself moved to tears by music?  Eva Cassidy’s Somewhere over the Rainbow does it for me.  How about you?   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, Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, and Kirill Fayn, Department of Psychology, University of Sydney, collaborated on research to investigate the emotions that people feel when music makes them feel like crying.   Evoking emotion is the point of music, after all, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that songs can put a lump in your throat.  Music can calm or excite; it can motivate–unite worshipers in peace and devotion, or drive people, to the sound of drum and bugle, into battle.  Likewise, crying is a complex human behavior that can accompany a variety of intense experiences.  Crying can be provoked by grief, as at a funeral, but also by the opposite:  extreme happiness, as at a wedding. But helplessness and 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% 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 large majority (63%) reported feeling sad when music made them cry, and 36.7% reported feeling awe.  Is there something about the personalities of people in these two different groups that could explain why these two very different emotional reactions—sadness and awe–provoked tears while listening to music?

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 create such a moving performance, and to deliver it with perfection, with nothing other than her beautiful voice, her skillful self-accompaniment on acoustic guitar with resonant jazz chords and intricate broken arpeggio riffs, the stark creativity and talent, without embellishment, without back-up accompaniment, without studio effects or retakes.  It was a live performance, and the tension of sustaining perfection alone in the spotlight on a stage magnified the stakes.  It is the sound of her voice infused with such emotion and heartfelt soulfulness in singing a song that had become a thread-worn children’s jingle from a lifetime of overuse, but now transformed and soaring, something new and uniquely her own.    So I guess that puts me among the minority against the two-thirds majority of people who cry because a song is sad, and 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.

The 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% of the participants were female, and the possible effect of gender was not analyzed.  (“Men don’t cry…”)  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 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 into the university, police dogs, firehoses blasting protestors 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.  It is natural to feel powerless and overwhelmed by forces of national and international power.  What can one person possibly do?  All that Seeger had was a banjo.  It was 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.  No nation lacks a national anthem, and when tears well upon hearing it, as they often do, isn’t it this peculiar bittersweet mix of sadness and awe that we feel?  As a biologist I see tooth and nail everywhere in nature, because unfortunately violence is sometimes necessary for survival.  But amidst current events hurling 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.


First published in Psychology Today

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1 Comment

  1. Eman Abdellatif, Ph.D. Architecture on September 30, 2018 at 5:16 am

    In my work as an architecture professor and developer, i remove obstacles in people and students blocking their creativity through a visual abstraction process using abstract water colouring in which I can analyse their characters and problems. I lately integrated music in the process and it helped them reach even deeper into their personal internal space. I sued music that consists of long low melodies and rythems that provoke sadness. The result was amazing. The course I do is visual/musical abstraction inwhich I help them synchronise into creative building processes with each other and the community through a hands-on design build process and abstracting music to abstract model using visual musical abstraction. The more I integrate music in the visual process the more amazing the results are. Please contact me so that we may collaborate.

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