Music Preference May Reveal the Way you Think: What Songs Say About You

First Posted: Jul 24, 2015 07:40 AM EDT

Your musical taste may reveal how you think. Scientists have discovered that preferring jazz, rock or other types of music could shed light on the way your brain processes thoughts.

Music is a prominent feature of everyday life, and is present nearly everywhere we go: in malls, at the movies, in the grocery store. It's easy to tell what types of music we like and don't like. However, very little is known about what determines our taste in music.

In the past, researchers have argued that musical preferences reflect explicit characteristics such as age and personality. For example, people who are open to new experience tend to prefer music from the blues, jazz, classical and folk genres. Those who are extraverted and "agreeable" tend to prefer music from the pop, soundtrack, religious, soul, funk, electronic and dance genres.

Now, scientists have looked at how our cognitive style influences our musical choices. They looked at whether an individual scored highly on an "empathy" test or a "systemizing" test or whether the person had a balance of both to see how that influenced their choice in music.

"Although people's music choices fluctuate over time, we've discovered a person's empathy levels and thinking style predicts what kind of music they like," said David Greenberg, one of the researchers, in a news release. "In fact, their cognitive style-whether they're strong on empathy or strong on systems-can be a better predictor of what music they like than their personality."

The researchers found that people who scored high on empathy tended to prefer mellow music, whether that happened to be R&B, soft rock, or adult contemporary genres in addition to unpretentious music, which included country and folk, and contemporary music, which included electronica, Latin, acid jazz and Euro pop. These people disliked intense music such as punk and heavy metal. In contrast, people who scored high on systemizing favored intense music, but disliked mellow and unpretentious musical styles.

The researchers also found that those who scored high on empathy preferred music that had low energy or negative emotions, such as sad and depressing characteristics, or emotional depth. Those who scored high on systemizing preferred music that had high energy or positive emotion and which featured a high degree of cerebra depth and complexity.

The findings reveal a bit more about musical preferences and shows that your taste in music may very well shed some light on the way you think.

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.