Don’t Worry Emo Kid, Science Explains Why We Love Depressing Songs

During my high school years, emo emerged as a formidable music genre. A whole type of music completely dedicated to pouring out all your deepest, saddest emotions set to electric guitars. Of course, emo was just another link in the chain of sad music and poetry that has existed since written history. Bands like My Chemical Romance, The Used, and Fallout Boy became the soundtracks for teens. Many of us original “emo kids” now have kids of our own, yet we still listen to the same sad songs to drive our offspring to school or on our commutes to work. We just love feeling those heartbreaking emotions.

Although I love emo music, I’m a lifelong and die-hard fan of folk rock. I tend to pick the darker, sadder stuff to listen to. Someone once told me I probably felt sad a lot because I was listening to Damien Rice’s O album on repeat. When I tried to explain it made me feel better, they thought I had lost it. An all-time favorite band of mine, Bright Eyes, sums up the feeling with the lyric “The sound of loneliness makes me happier.” It might be hard to explain complex feelings, but scientific research has found an explanation as to why we love sad art so much.

It’s all about that “pleasurable sadness”

As reported by NPR, neuroscientists have figured out why we enjoy sadness in our music and art. At Columbia University, research scientists tried to understand what compels us to make depressing stuff. Most of the time, we don’t want to be sad, yet a hallmark of powerful art is the evoking of tears. I would tell people how good HBO’s The Last of Us was because it made me sob every episode.

During MRIs, researchers found that sad art stimulated the part of the brain that controls emotion as expected. However, they also noticed the part of the brain that controls pleasure also lit up. Matt Sachs, a researcher, said they refer to the phenomenon as “pleasurable sadness.”

Sachs elaborated as to why humans would find sad art pleasurable, underlining how it defines the human experience. “It allows us to experience the benefits that sadness brings, such as eliciting empathy, such as connecting with others, such as purging a negative emotion, without actually having to go through the loss that is typically associated with it,” he said. On a personal note, Sachs added, that he listened to Elliot Smith when he felt down because “I feel less alone. I feel like he understands what I’m going through.”

(via NPR; featured image: Universal Music)