“So please, hurry, leave me
I can’t breathe
Please don’t say you love me”
Like many melancholic ballads, Mitski’s “First Love, Late Spring” takes listeners on a journey through her sadness that listeners can resonate with. Research has shown that people enjoy art forms that portray sadness more than non-art media that do the same. For instance, if Mitski’s words on love and heartbreak were coming from your close friend in the form of a complaint, you likely wouldn’t appreciate it as much.
In their recent article published in Cognitive Science, scientist Tara Venkatesan YC ’18 and Yale professor of philosophy Joshua Knobe explored why people enjoy sad art. “Lumping [sad art] together with many other phenomena where we want to feel something that’s in a certain way aversive [is a common misconception],” Knobe said.
As an opera singer herself, Venkatesan wanted to learn more about why she and others enjoy sad music. A possible hypothesis for this common occurrence revolves around fictionality, suggesting that sad art is relished because the audience knows that it is not real. However, the authors hypothesized that appropriation, the idea that art expresses one’s own sadness, may be a more accurate reason why people appreciate sad art so much.
To test this hypothesis, they conducted four studies using four pairs of art versus non-art forms: short story/blog post, song lyrics/tweet, monologue/diary entry, and movie script/dialogue. They first explored if framing a piece of media as art or non-art impacted how much someone liked it, which revealed that people prefer sad content in art form. The second study expanded on this idea by exploring the effect of fictionality on people’s enjoyment of sad art. The researchers found that, although participants generally believed something labeled as art was fictional, they enjoyed non-fictional art more than fictional art. “I think this was really shocking because so many people in the literature had proposed this [fictionality] as a possible explanation for why people like sad art,” Venkatesan said.
Since fictionality was found to negatively affect how much a person liked sad art, the third study aimed to explore if appropriation affected a person’s appreciation of sad art over non-art forms. This revealed that artwork causes more appropriation than non-art, which can lead to more enjoyment. The fourth study investigated the extent to which people would appropriate and like art if they were explicitly told that the artworks were based on real events and emotions (versus having no details about the fictionality). There was no major effect on how much people appropriated the content, but regardless of how the art was presented, the extent to which people appropriated the work predicted enjoyment.
This study reveals that a reason why people relish sad art so much as opposed to non-art is their ability to appropriate the emotions in sad art as one’s own. Unlike the commonly accepted hypothesis, fictionality seems to negatively impact how much people like sad art. “If you consider these different art forms, is it that appropriation is possible equally across all of them, or is it that there’s something about certain ones that really lend themselves to appropriation?” Knobe said.
Venkatesan encourages readers to apply these findings to their own lives and notice why they appreciate sad art. “Next time you listen to a sad song, are you thinking about the sadness of the singer? Or are you letting the lyrics give voice to your own sad emotions and experiences?”
With this information, we can learn more about why we consume the art that we choose to and what effects it has on us.