Firstly, some people have a really strong capacity for absorption, or the ability to get so immersed in what they’re doing that they completely lose track of time and the sense of where they are.
This kind of people seem to be able to just really enjoy the emotional journey of the music, and they don’t experience any displeasure in the way that you would, if it was sadness triggered by real life events.
Another group of people are able to use the time listening to sad music to reflect on their own lives.
I mean if you think about it, sadness is actually an adaptive emotion from an evolutionary perspective.
It motivates us to think about our lives and think about things that might need changes and motivates us to make those changes.
So people who have strong capacities to reflection, the very reflective people, they seem to have the ability to actually use the time when they are listening to sad music to process emotions that they might be going through and to think about how they can address the problems that might be triggering sadness in them.
Some of the additional psychological benefits they might get are catharsis or being able to just get rid of
all those pent-up emotions that are building up, and sometimes people are able to get a really nice feeling from the music that they are not alone in what they are experiencing, a nice feeling that they are other people out there who understand how they feel.
So these are the types of psychological benefits that reflective people seem to be able to get from listening to sad music.
