Finding Comfort in Music Genres

Why do people find comfort in certain music genres, and how does music affect our behavior?

It is known by most that music can and likely does affect our behavior, many people wonder how and why it affects so many people in such diverse ways. Could it be because music makes us feel a certain way? Do different music genres make us think different thoughts? What kind of thoughts do they cause us to come up with? Can music cause us to act a certain way? Does music have any health benefits for humans? If so, what health benefits does it have?

During the last four decades, metal music lyrics have become increasingly explicit-particularly with reference to sex, drugs, and violence. Music is important to teenagers’ identity especially and helps them define important social and subcultural boundaries. During the 1980s and 1990s, the most rebellious forms of Metal, African American music, and electronic dance music were labeled by adults as “problematic” music and perceived as to be promoting violence, substance abuse, sex, blasphemy, and depression (ter Bogt, Keijsers & Meeus, 2013). While Metal music does have a tendency to be very aggressive, when that aggression is felt by the listeners, it is likely to be exhibited in ways that do seem to be unsafe but very safe at the same time.

Although the many claim that engaging with “unusual” media will inevitably lead to problematic behavior are wildly exaggerated, social scientific research has uncovered associations between media use, particularly music listening and music video watching, and a range of externalizing problematic behaviors, including minor misbehavior (ter Bogt, Keijsers & Meeus, 2013).

A small amount of research has investigated the role of music in the development of agg...

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...ial lyrics. Also as predicted, participants’ mood was negatively influenced by annoying music and antisocial lyrics. However, the no music control condition produced unexpected results in which participants’ positive and negative mood scores both decreased.

There are several possible explanations as to why an individual’s mood would change based on music. As previously found, music with prosocial lyrics gives an individual access to more prosocial thoughts (Greitmeyer, 2009). We believe the prevalence of prosocial thoughts would make a person more inclined to rate themselves higher on the positive affect items present in the PANAS. This being the case, we can make the argument that music with antisocial lyrics would have the opposite effect. We believe individuals would have more access to antisocial thoughts, thus rating themselves higher on negative affect items.