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3 curious effects of music on your behavior

3 curious effects of music on your behavior

March 29, 2024

There are songs that produce relaxation, others leave us somewhat melancholic and many others that load us batteries and activate us.

Music changes your behavior

However, the music not only our emotional state influences , but it also alters and can determine our behavior. It can encourage 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 can be strongly related. There is no doubt that music affects our way of perceiving the world: it is much more than mere entertainment.


1. Frantic music optimizes your performance

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

In an interesting research 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 heard neutral, animated or frenetic music. The conclusions were revealing: those students who heard frantic music were stimulated better and reported better results , being more predisposed for the task.


As reported by academics, the improvement in performance that causes this type of music is only effective in contexts of competitive performance.

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 cliché, the truth is that an investigation by the University of Bretagne-Sud confirms this maxim. The academics recruited young women and invited them to wait in a room. During these waitings, neutral music or romantic music was broadcast through the speakers in the room. After ten minutes, the women met the interviewer, who at one point in the interview, flirted with each of the women and asked for their mobile phone number. What happened?


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

3. Music attenuates pain

They are known some little tricks to relieve pain , and not all of them go through taking an analgesic. Many specialists recommend that drug use is always the last resort, since there are other techniques to feel better. A 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 a slight emotional pain. While this happened, some remained silent, others could look away and could see some famous pictures, and a third group listened to music that they liked especially. In this way It could be appreciated 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 typical of anxiety or depressive disorders. None of the studies could verify any relationship between the style of music and its positive effects for 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 the personal preference and the enjoyment that 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. A. 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.

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