Psychology of music preference

The psychology of music preference refers to the psychological factors behind peoples' different music preferences. Music is heard by people daily in many parts of the world, and affects people in various ways from emotion regulation to cognitive development, along with providing a means for self-expression. Music training has been shown to help improve intellectual development and ability, though no connection has been found as to how it affects emotion regulation. Numerous studies have been conducted to show that individual personality can have an effect on music preference, mostly using the Big Five personality traits. These studies are not limited to Western or American culture, as they have been conducted with significant results in countries all over the world, including Japan, Germany, and Spain.

Psychologists generally accept the notion that nonclinical individual differences could be summarized according to five different dimensions. Many research studies have used these Big Five personality traits as their measures for personality, which breaks personality down into five categories: openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness.

Various questionnaires have been created to both measure the big five personality traits and musical preferences. The majority of studies attempting to find the correlation between personality and musical preferences administered questionnaires to measure both traits. Others used questionnaires to determine personality traits, and then asked participants to rate musical excerpts on scales such as liking, perceived complexity, emotions felt, and more.

In general, the plasticity traits (openness to experience and extraversion) affect music preference more than the stability traits (agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness), but each trait is still worth discussing. The personality traits have also been shown to correlate significantly with the emotional effect music has on people. Individual personality differences can help predict the emotional intensity and valence derived from music.

Of all the traits, openness to experience has been shown to have the greatest effect upon genre preference. In general, those rated high in openness to experience prefer more music categorized as complex and novel like classical, jazz, and eclecticism, and intense and rebellious music. In the study, reflective and complex genres included classical, blues, jazz, and folk music, while intense and rebellious genres included rock, alternative, and heavy metal music. One of the facets of openness to experience is aesthetic appreciation, which is why researchers generally explain the high positive correlation between openness and liking complex music. People rating higher in openness also tend to rate higher in self-assessed intelligence. This suggests that high openness leads to higher self-perceived intelligence, which could also explain why this group tends to like more complex, classical music and jazz.

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