3 curious effects of music on your behavior

There are songs that make us relax, others leave us somewhat melancholic and many others that charge our batteries and activate us.

Music changes your behavior

However, the music not only influences our emotional state, but it also alters and can determine our behavior. It can incite us to drink more alcohol, to buy more products than we need when we are in a store, or even to commit acts that violate our moral principles.

As we saw in a previous article, the music we listen to and the personality they can be strongly related. There is no doubt that music affects the way we perceive the world: it is much more than mere entertainment.

1. Frenetic music optimizes your performance

We usually conceptualize the go to as a negative emotion, but this feeling can also be channeled for positive results. Anger makes it easier for us to stay focused on the reward., increases our determination and even gives us an extra dose of optimism to face the challenges.

In an interesting investigation that was carried out by Stanford University and Boston College, several students were willing to

play a video game. Before starting the game, some participants listened to neutral, lively or frantic music. The conclusions were revealing: those students who heard frenetic music were better stimulated and reported better results, being more predisposed for the task.

As the academics reported, the performance enhancement that this type of music elicits is only effective in competitive performance contexts.

2. Music predisposes us to love

If your goal is to give a good image of yourself to a person you want, a decisively positive element will be put romantic music in the background. Although it may sound like a popular myth or a cliché, the truth is that research by the University of Bretagne-Sud confirms this maxim. The academics recruited young women and invited them to wait in a room. During these waits, neutral music, or romantic music, was broadcast through the loudspeakers of the living room. After ten minutes, the women met the interviewer, who at one point during the interview, flirted with each of the women and asked for her mobile phone number. What happened?

Only 28% of the women who had heard the neutral music prior to the interview gave the number to the interviewer. However, 52.5% of women who had listened to romantic music did agree to report their phone number. The contrasts, as we can see, were very significant.

3. Music attenuates the pain

Are known some little tricks to ease the pain, and not all of them go through taking a pain reliever. Many specialists recommend that the consumption of drugs is always the last resort, since there are other techniques to feel better. Research conducted at Bishop University showed that listening to music has pain-relieving properties.

On this occasion, the researchers recruited eighty people, to whom they administered stimuli that caused them mild emotional pain. While that was happening, some remained silent, others could look away and could look at some famous paintings, and a third group listened to music that they liked especially. In this way it could be seen that those who listened to music reported less anxiety, lower perception of pain, and an increase in tolerance to it compared to the subjects of the other groups.

Several studies prior to Bishop's have pointed out that people who listen to music on a daily basis are less likely to show symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorders. None of the studies could verify any relationship between the style of music and its positive effects on the mood of the listener, nor its effect of reducing pain. Therefore, everything seems to suggest that the key to the positive properties of music is personal preference and the enjoyment they cause to each person.

Bibliographic references:

• Guéguen, N. et. Al. (2010) Love is in the air: Effects of songs with romantic lyrics on compliance with a courtship request ”from Psychology of Music. Psychology of Music; 38(3): 303-307.
• Mitchell, L. TO. et. Al. (2008) An investigation of the effects of music and art on pain perception. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts; 2(3): 162-170.
• Tamir, M. et. Al. (2008) Hedonic and Instrumental Motives in Anger Regulation. Psychological Science; 19(4): 324-328.