Research: Personality Types and Music Preferences
![]() Every December since 2016, Spotify runs a hugely popular campaign where users get stats on which musicians and genres they listened to the most. The virality of the campaign lies in the fact that people think that the kind of music they listen to says something about them. Research linking personality types to music preferences suggests that they are right. Previous studies have hinted at a biological basis for music preferences. Hormones and environment shape the music someone likes. Scientists also have previously explored the relationships between particular music preferences and personality traits. Now, a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looks at these relationships on a cross-cultural scale.
Researchers from Cambridge University and Bar-Ilan University reported that the correlations between personality types and musical genres are largely the same for people worldwide. What sounds pleasing to an introvert in Europe is also likely to make an Asian introvert groove. The researchers used a widely used framework for studying music preferences. Aptly named MUSIC, it boxes music genres into five different kinds: mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, and contemporary. While mellow features genres like soft rock and R&B, unpretentious includes country music; sophisticated, intense, and contemporary include jazz, rock, and rap music, respectively, among many others. Personality types were also grouped into five types according to a popular model in psychology research: OCEAN. The five types are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As the names suggest, people with these personalities are likely to be inventive, diligent, outgoing, friendly, and nervous, respectively. The researchers had some hypotheses for the pairwise interactions between personality type and music preference. For example, since openness is marked by a desire for new experiences, people with this personality type should be more likely to enjoy sophisticated music. Similarly, extroverts are likely to have fun listening to unpretentious tunes. To determine if their hypotheses were correct and were applicable across the whole world, the researchers conducted two independent studies to assess musical preference. The first study analyzed data on nearly 285,000 individuals from across 53 countries. (The survey they took is online here.) The second study used data from another website where the participants filled out a questionnaire and rated audio clips from different genres. The clips were sampled in a manner that lowered the chance that the participants had any prior experience with them, thereby eliminating bias. Data was collected on over 71,000 participants from 36 countries. The authors found several interesting correlations. For instance, a listener of mellow music genres is more likely to be a woman, whereas a listener of intense music more likely to be a man. While the preference for mellow music among women was true in all countries studied, preference for intense music among men was split. Men from the Western hemisphere are more likely to enjoy intense music, whereas those from the Eastern hemisphere, with the exception of Australia, dislike it. Among older people, few have any tolerance for intense music, preferring to listen to mellow, unpretentious, or sophisticated genres instead. An old person's music preferences are similar to those of Asian people of all ages. Black and Latino people gravitated toward contemporary music. The researchers also examined correlations between musical preferences and personality types both within and between countries. They noticed that the strength of correlations are closer for countries that are geographically adjacent. The only cluster of like-minded music fans that consisted of distant countries included Brazil, Argentina, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and South Africa. It isn't clear what unites these countries, but the researchers suggested warm climate as a possible factor. QUANTUM HEALTH TIP: Beyond musical preferences, you can find out what gem elixirs are best for you using our Trinity Gem Elixir search. Just type in the keyword to find the right gem elixirs for you. |
Train Your Attention for Maximum Focus
![]() In the modern world stress has become distress, negative moods have become chronic melancholy, and threats are overrepresented. There are many reasons for this hyper-charging, but a prominent one is the attention economy. Technology companies, news media, and political players now recognize attention as the resource it is and, in some ways, regard it as more valuable than money. "Money follows attention, whereas the reverse is not necessarily true. As our economy becomes more dependent on attention, the medium of exchange flows from the holders of the old to the holders of the new," writes the Berkeley Economic Review. News organizations, for example, favor headlines that drip with threat and tragedy--the so-called "if it bleeds, it leads" standard. That's because we're hardwired to assess threats and determine what can be done. Essentially, we need to find out if the story represents a log or a crocodile. The more people compelled to perform that assessment, the more newspapers sold. People used to pay some of their daily attention to the news, either a morning read of the paper or an hour watching the evening broadcast. But in the era of 24/7 news coverage--the era of the attention economy--we're paying that attentional cost throughout the day. Over time, it becomes a sizable withdraw of our mental energy, yet we continue to check our news feeds for threats even when we should be focused on something else. Is the answer then to wall yourself off from stressors, disconnect from social media, and choose not to engage with news coverage? "My answer is a resounding no," Jha writes. "Many stressors are unavoidable, while others are part of our journey to fulfillment and success--if we remove them, we would be limiting ourselves." While attention is both powerful and fragile, it has a third feature: It's trainable through mindfulness. Just as exercise trains the body, mindfulness trains the mind by strengthening your meta-awareness--that is, your ability to be aware of where you're placing your awareness. Through her research, Jha discovered what she calls the "minimum effective dose" of mindfulness. Her team found that lab participants who practiced mindfulness for 12 minutes or more a day saw benefits in objective measures of attention and mood. Those who practiced for less did not. In Peak Mind, Jha lays out a four-week regimen to help readers build their mindfulness habits. But in her interview, Jha shared an exercise you can do right now to exercise your attentional system. Simply follow these steps:
QUANTUM HEALTH TIP: Use the Zen Meditation Elixir to make it easier to focus and stay present. |
Chanting OM Improves Everything
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BENEFITS:
QUANTUM HEALTH TIP: Before beginning your "OM" session, spray your meditation area with Clean Sweep to harmonize the energies and neutralize any negativity. |
Health & Healing Hack of the Week
Heart Coherence
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Quantum Healer of the Week
Tamara Dorris
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Company & Product News
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NEW FORMULA!
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AMAZING PRODUCT ALERT: Golden Proportion
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Trinity Gem Elixir for the Month
Garnet
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