What type of music do you listen to? When making music, artists put their heart and thoughts into the art they’re creating. In other words, you can say that they put their personality into the music to express themselves. Recent studies at Heriot-Watt University discovered how there is a link between the type of music you listen to and what it says about your character and personality.
According to researchers, music can say a great deal about your personality and how you act. At the Heriot-Watt University, 36,000 participants from all over the world commented on their music taste and their personality. The researchers came to a conclusion and noticed a pattern between the different music genres. For example, if you listen to rock/heavy metal music, researchers say that you are more introverted and are quite gentle. When first thinking of rock music, you tend to think that the people that listen to it are more aggressive. Pop music listeners are found to be extroverted and honest, rap listeners tend to be outgoing, country listeners typically hard-working and conventional, indie listeners are creative and intellectual, and jazz listeners are found to have high self-esteem and always at ease.
Psychologists Jason Rentfrow and Sam Gosling argue that the type of music you listen to gives close-to-accurate predictions on your personality. Extroverts tend to seek out songs with heavy bass lines. On the other hand, those who enjoy more complex styles such as jazz and classical music tend to be more creative and have higher IQ-scores.
The idea that listening to classical music and its positive effects on your intelligence is known as the Mozart effect. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine studied this phenomenon and showed that listening to classical music can improve your intelligence and generally “make you smarter”. However, this idea and 1993 study have been seen as controversial because improvement in cognitive skills and performance can be explained with “enjoyment arousal”. In other words, their high performance was due to their enjoyment and appreciation of the type of music. The positive stimulus put on the brain enhances cognitive skills. This can connect to the type of music we listen to. Whatever the type of music it is, a person can enjoy it, which can relate to their personality and how they act.
In conclusion, after certain studies, researchers and psychologists uncovered how the genre of music reveals predictions about your personality. Listening to any type of music you enjoy enhances your cognitive skills and from the studies, listening to your music can help improve performance in school. So, whenever you feel like you’re struggling with academics, listen to your favorite artist and put this phenomenon to the test.
The Viking Journal 