Reinvestigating the Effect of Interpersonal Sadness on Mood-Congruency in Music Preference

In a recent series of studies, Lee, Andrade, and Palmer (2013) put forward evidence that states of sadness associated with interpersonal, relative to noninterpersonal, losses heighten preferences for mood-congruent music. However, they inadvertently confounded loss type (interpersonal vs. noninterpersonal) with loss intensity and administered dependent measures of mood-congruent musical expression that were poor in ecological validity. We conducted two experiments to rectify these critical shortfalls and thereby more diagnostically assess their hypothesis. Replicating Lee et al.'s (2013, Study 1), Experiment 1 found that individuals predicted that they would be more inclined to choose sad versus cheerful music following interpersonal versus noninterpersonal losses. This effect was independent of loss intensity, which was itself shown to exert a parallel influence on predicted preference for expressively sad music. Experiment 2, in which equally intense states of interpersonal and noninterpersonal sadness were directly manipulated, failed to conceptually replicate Lee et al.'s (2013, Study 3) finding that interpersonal, relative to noninterpersonal, sadness led to more mood-congruent music preference. However, consistent with Lee et al.'s (2013) underlying logic, individuals led to experience interpersonal sadness did show mood-congruent musical preference (i.e., preference for expressively sadder/less cheerful songs) relative to those in neutral moods, a difference not found for individuals in states of noninterpersonal sadness. Therefore, the present findings may be seen as supporting the general contention that sadness associated with interpersonal loss is relatively likely to engender a preference for mood-congruent music.