OK – get the tissues ready because team of scientists may have stumbled upon a song that will make you feel some level of sad.
The song, Discovery of the Camp – an instrumental piece which was featured in acclaimed WWII mini-series, Band of Brothers – is one that has been used to “induce sadness” in people across several studies the past few years.
One 2013 study used the song to investigate how extra-musical (ie: a piece of film) information contributes to emotions induced by music and most recently the music has been used in a study trying to understand the connection between sadness and empathy.
Research published in journal Frontiers in Psychology just this month saw 102 people between the ages of 18 and 67 asked to listen to eight and a half minutes of Discovery of the Camp and then highlight their feelings.
In the study the authors wrote that this excerpt of music “has been previously validated, and successfully used to induce sadness in participants.”
The answers from the subjects were then dived into three categories; relaxing sadness – “positive, peaceful and relaxing emotional responses to sad music”, nervous sadness – characterised by fear or anxiety, and moving sadness – “a complex and intense emotional experience, involving both aesthetic, enjoyable emotions and feelings of sadness.”
Participants were also asked to take an empathy test and this was then compared with their post-song analysis.
People who reported being “moved” by the sad song demonstrate higher levels of empathy than their peers, possibly meaning the people who feel the pain of a sad song may be better at feeling the pain of other human beings.
“Music appreciation involves social cognition,” explains one of the study’s authors Tuomas Eerola, a music cognition professor at Durham University. “People sensitive and willing to empathise with the misfortune of another person—in this case represented by the sad music—are somehow rewarded by the process.”
In short, these scientists believe empathetic people tend to appreciate sad music more than others because they get a deeper level of understanding of the world around them from it.
Of course, this study has many limitations – one big one being that there was such a small cohort measured – but whatever the reason behind getting teary while listening to a song, we’ll feel free to put it down to having too much bloody empathy next time.
**Genius alert: Sydney mum invented a device to help babies stop crying on planes…*
