Does music actually impact your emotions? - By Carolina Santos


Does music actually impact your emotions?



Music is powerful enough to make us experience emotions and many people listen to songs just to feel emotions. So, in result music is constantly being researched and its impact on emotions and now is used for therapy. As myself being a big fan of music and the feelings it gives me, I thought this would be a great opportunity dig deeper about this topic.

Joy, sadness, relaxation, these are only some of the emotions that can be provoked by music. This is because music activates the emotion related parts of the brain (the limbic system). Upper beats tend to impulse happiness and excitement in our brain, while lower beats give us more chills and makes us calmer or even sadder. However, rhythm is not the only reason why music affects our emotion, the lyrics are also very important. Sometimes music is able to impulse emotions in people do to memories connected to a song, for example, when a mother sings to its baby a sweet song many times, in the future the baby will grow and remember the music with emotion. Personally, when a song has very strong lyrics or message, it definitely triggers emotions in me. It is also very therapeutical, especially if the lyrics of a song matches the situation in which a person is, as the person will identify themselves with the song and feel understood.  And in my case, music is like the remedy to all my problems.



This leads to Music Therapy, this is an established health therapy which uses music to address physical, cognitive, emotional and social needs of a person. First, the professional analyses the strengths and necessities of the individual and then he decides and indicates the treatment which involves creating, singing and moving and/or listening to music. This therapy is very helpful for people that have trouble with expressing themselves. In fact, this kind of therapy is very helpful to people which suffer from depression, anxiety, substance dependency, schizophrenia, autism and many more health issues (mostly mental).



With this research, I confirmed what I believed which was that music can indeed affect someone’s emotions a lot. But, I also learned that music therapy is very effective. The reason why I believed that this was true is because I listen to music a lot and it always has an impact on how my mood is.


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