An online survey exploring the frequency of earworms found that these experiences are associated with 22 different everyday life habits and compulsions. The strongest associations were with repetitive motor behaviors, such as foot tapping, and repetitive mental behaviors, such as counting and spelling. The study was published in Consciousness and Cognition.
Earworms are catchy pieces of music that repeatedly play in a person’s mind, often without conscious intent. They are typically short melodies or choruses that are easy to remember and have simple, repetitive structures.
Earworms can be triggered by hearing a song, thinking of certain words, or experiencing particular emotions or situations. They are a common psychological phenomenon and affect most people at some point. While often harmless, persistent earworms can be distracting or irritating for some individuals. Research suggests that people with higher musical engagement or certain personality traits, such as openness or neuroticism, may experience earworms more frequently.
Study author Chris M. Dodds investigated the connection between earworms and various forms of repetitive behavior. He examined how prone individuals are to engaging in different habitual behaviors and analyzed the relationship between the frequency and range of these behaviors and the occurrence of earworms. The research was conducted using an online survey.
The study included 883 adults from the general population of the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited through emails and social media. The average age of participants was 34 years.
Participants provided information about their own and their family’s mental health history and completed several psychological assessments. These included the Habitual Behavior Checklist, the Routine subscale of the Creature of Habit Scale (which measures preference for routine), and the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale.
The results indicated that individuals who reported more frequent and intense experiences of earworms also tended to have more repetitive behavioral habits, more severe anxiety symptoms, and a stronger preference for routine in daily life.
Among specific types of repetitive habits, motor and mental behaviors showed the strongest associations with earworms. Motor habits included behaviors such as gesturing, striking poses, foot tapping or leg shaking, fiddling with objects, biting objects, or cracking knuckles. Mental habits included internal behaviors such as memorizing information, mentally spelling words, creating specific mental images, counting objects or actions, and mentally repeating certain words, names, phrases, or numbers.
“These findings suggest that previously observed associations between earworms and OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] symptomatology might be due to a common basis in systems that produce and regulate habitual behavior,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the links between repetitive behavior habits and earworms. However, it should be noted that all the study data came from self-reports leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results.
The paper “Earworms as ‘mental habits’: Involuntary musical imagery is associated with a wide range of habitual behaviors” was authored by Chris M. Dodds.