All these mechanisms seem to be unrelated to music itself, suggesting that any (familiar) music may be able to deliver the desired effects ( Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008). In these explanations, music is typically familiar to listeners, and considered to be either a vehicle to reminisce ( Tahlier et al., 2013), to reflect on ideas conveyed by the lyrics ( Mori and Iwanaga, 2014), or to derive comfort from Van den Tol and Edwards (2013). The reasons for listening to self-identified sad music have been explained in terms of mood regulation ( Garrido and Schubert, 2011b Van den Tol and Edwards, 2015), mood congruency ( Hunter et al., 2011 Taruffi and Koelsch, 2014), and autobiographical memories ( Vuoskoski and Eerola, 2012 Tahlier et al., 2013), which suggest that the appeal is external to music. Furthermore, most cultures have distinct types of sad music ( Agawu, 1988) that can be recognized from relatively simple acoustic cues even without appropriate cultural knowledge ( Laukka et al., 2013). Listening to sad music is one particularly striking example of this phenomenon it is not only common for listeners to report feelings of sadness induced by sad music ( Juslin et al., 2011), but these experiences are typically described to be highly enjoyable ( Eerola and Peltola, 2016 Peltola and Eerola, 2016).
However, the underlying mechanisms for this paradox still remain unclear. The paradoxical enjoyment of negative emotions such as sadness has attracted contemporary attention in diverse fields such as media psychology ( Schramm and Wirth, 2010), philosophy ( Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2013), psychology ( Wildschut et al., 2006 Goldstein, 2009), and neuroscience ( Wagner et al., 2014). The human ability to derive genuine pleasure from tragedy and sadness portrayed in fiction has been acknowledged for millennia (e.g., the writings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hobbes). The findings are interpreted within a theoretical framework of embodied emotions.
Relaxing sadness and Nervous sadness were not significantly predicted by any of the individual difference variables. Experiences of Moving sadness were strongly associated with high trait empathy and emotional contagion, but not with other previously suggested traits such as absorption or nostalgia-proneness. These interpretations were supported by indirect measures of felt emotion. Nervous sadness was associated with felt anxiety, perceived scariness and negative valence. Moving sadness captured an intense experience that involved feelings of sadness and being moved. Relaxing sadness was characterized by felt and perceived peacefulness and positive valence. The results suggest that the emotional responses induced by unfamiliar sad music could be characterized in terms of three underlying factors: Relaxing sadness, Moving sadness, and Nervous sadness. One hundred and two participants were drawn from a representative sample to minimize self-selection bias. Unlike prior studies that have explored potential explanations related to lyrics, memories, and mood regulation, we investigated the types of emotions induced by unfamiliar, instrumental sad music, and whether these responses are consistently associated with certain individual difference variables. The paradox of enjoying listening to music that evokes sadness is yet to be fully understood. 4Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.3Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.2Department of Music, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland.1Department of Music, Durham University, Durham, UK.