People with depression feel better after listening to sad music, research suggests

People with depression listen to sad music because it makes them feel better, according to a small study that is one of the first to investigate why people turn to tearjerkers when they’re already down.

The first part of the study, published recently in the journal Emotion, tried to repeat the findings of a 2015 study that showed that depressed people preferred listening to sad music. Researchers at the University of South Florida asked 76 female undergrads (half of them were diagnosed with depression) to listen to various classical music clips. “Happy” music included Jacques Offenbach’s cheerful “Infernal Gallop,” and “sad” music included Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which is almost universally considered to be extremely...

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