A study conducted in Germany discovered that cravings for music and the occurrence of earworms tend to rise after listening to a song. Individuals displaying more pronounced personality traits of extraversion, psychoticism, and openness to experience exhibited a stronger inherent craving for music. The paper was published in Psychology of Music.
Craving is a powerful and intense desire or urge for a specific substance or experience, often associated with addiction or dependency. It is characterized by an overwhelming emotional and physiological response that drives an individual to seek out and consume the desired object, despite potential negative consequences.
Craving is the most intensely studied in the scope of various addictions. These studies show that craving increases when an individual is exposed to cues related to the substance they are addicted to (e.g. seeing it, smelling it, hearing sounds associated with it etc.). When this happens, a person experiences a strong increase in the subjective urge to consume the substance. A specific neural pattern can be detected in the mesolimbic reward system of the brain at those times as well.
Recent studies on internet, smartphone, and gaming addictions indicated that craving and addiction are not solely related to substances. Scientists now talk about behavioral addictions as well. But are reactions to music guided by the same or similar neural mechanisms?
Study author Katrin Stacke and her colleagues wanted to find out. They conducted a study in which they assessed subjective craving reactions and experiences of earworms before and after listening to music. They also assessed some components of participants’ personality. These researchers wondered if the craving reactions might be associated with personality characteristics. Their expectation was that strengths of earworms and cravings will change after listening to music.
Earworms, also known as involuntary musical imagery, are catchy pieces of music that seem to loop repeatedly in one’s mind without conscious effort. These snippets of music are believed to be triggered by emotions, memories, or even random exposure. They can persist for hours or days and are a common experience among people.
The study involved 81 adults aged between 21 and 60 years, including 31 females, with an average age of 30. The study was conducted using the online tool Labvanced.
Participants first completed assessments of musical preferences (the Short Test of Music Preferences) and personality (the Short Eysenck Personality Profiler and the NEO PI-R Openness scale). They then reported on their current craving for music (a modified version of the Desires for Alcohol Questionnaire) and strengths of potential earworms (the Musical Imagery Questionnaire, a version they modified to ask about earworms as a current state).
Next, participants listened to a song they chose from a list of eight songs. The songs offered were “Riders on the Storm (single version)” (The Doors), “Let it be” (The Beatles), “Gangstas Paradise” (Coolio), “Shape of you” (Ed Sheeran), “Levans Polka” (Loituma), “Smells like teen spirit” (Nirvana), “September” (Earth, Wind, and Fire), and “Despacito” (Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee)”. After the song, participants again reported on their music cravings and earworms, completed a cognitive task, and filled out an earworm-related questionnaire.
The findings revealed that both music cravings and earworm intensities escalated post-listening. Notably, individuals with pronounced traits of extraversion, psychoticism, and openness experienced higher earworm intensities initially but not after the music session. These traits were also linked to initial music craving strengths, though such associations vanished post-listening, except for more emotionally stable individuals, who demonstrated a slightly stronger music craving thereafter.
“Results indicate that craving for music increased after listening to a piece of music. Thus, when participants started listening to music, they wanted more. They were not satisfied after listening to one piece of music. These findings extend cue-reactivity research in drug addiction or addictive behaviors. In addiction research, cues are presented but the substance consumption or the behavior is not executed, whereas music listening includes the ‘consumption’ of the stimulus,” the study authors concluded.
The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific understanding of psychological reactions to music. However, it should be noted that the study did not include either a control group or a control condition. This seriously limits how much the results can be generalized. Due to this, the study design does not allow any definitive cause-and-effect conclusions to be drawn from the data.
The study, ”Craving for music increases after music listening and is related to earworms and personality,” was authored by Katrin Stacke, Finn Garret Lüders, and Richard von Georgi.
