Paul McCartney reportedly wrote "Silly Love Songs" in 1976 in response to teasing by John Lennon and others for writing lightweight songs. But such songs are enormously popular, begging the question, why is it that people so like silly love songs?
The attraction of silly love songs fits the emotional education theme I have been developing over my last six posts. The basic idea is that we have an internal environment of biologically-based feelings and desires that we must explore, understand, and become competent in dealing with. So, just as we are motivated to explore and understand to achieve competence in the external physical environment, we are motivated to explore subjectively experienced feelings and desires to achieve emotional education,. But, the internal environment differs in that other persons do not have direct access to our feelings and desires, so that learning about these must be indirect, via social biofeedback. Such learning is intrinsically social as well as biological. Media come into the picture because there are many feelings and desires that cannot easily be explored in direct face-to-face interaction: these include socially dangerous sexual and aggressive feelings but also feelings of love, affection and bonding, the direct expression of which can be socially inappropriate or embarrassing. Feelings associated with social loss--feelings of loneliness, separation, and isolation caused by rejection, absence, or bereavement--are also intrinsically difficult to share directly with others. These feelings and desires tend to be the subject of silly love songs, from "Some Enchanted Evening" (1) to "If you Want to Keep your Beer Ice Cold (Set it Next to my Ex-Wife's Heart)." (2)
Communication media afford emotional exploration because they allow us vicariously to explore, imitate and model situations that can be socially dangerous or embarrassing, and also are relatively rare. Media often depict sexual and aggressive situations that are both dangerous and fortunately occur rarely in real life. The excess of such materials in media has been a source of concern among social scientists because of evidence that they can promote antisocial behavior including violence, and can diminish empathy for victims. In contrast, the abundance of silly love songs has not tended to elicit comment among social scientists, perhaps because there is no evidence, and indeed no reason to suggest, that it might cause harm. Indeed, the fact that we are so attracted to media has not been of as much interest to social scientists as is the troubling evidence of their harmful effects.
In the early 1980s, my students and I explored emotional motives to view media in studies of emotional responses to music videos. In the first study, music videos were presented to participants who rated the emotions elicited by the video and their liking of it. Four of the videos were silly love songs: Lionel Ritchie's All Night Long (3), Eric Martin's Don't Stop (4), Linda Ronstadt's What's New (5), and ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man (6). These had clear happiness appeals, with ratings of happiness strongly correlating with ratings of liking. One much darker video was chosen for its aggressive content-Rolling Stones' Under Cover of the Night (7)-showed a power appeal, in that liking was correlated with ratings of power. A video with anti-war content, Fields of Fire by Big Country (8), showed a child playing with toy soldiers inter-cut with scenes of combat. For men, liking for the video was positively correlated with ratings of sadness, fear, and anger: men apparently liked Fields of Fire when viewing it made them feel sad, afraid, and angry.
Thus, the videos had differing emotional appeals based upon their content and audience gender. However, ratings of two emotions were significantly correlated with liking for both genders across all seven videos: liking was positively correlated with interest and negatively correlated with boredom. A second study with a new set of MTV videos in the 1990s by Michelle Pulaski (now of Pace University), replicated these results: again, different videos showed different emotional appeals, but again liking was positively correlated with interest and negatively correlated with boredom. Thus, across all the videos in both studies, people liked them if the music made them interested and disliked them if the music made them bored. This suggests that listening to music is a kind of exploratory behavior where one is exploring one's own feelings and desires. More broadly, this suggests that the pleasure of entertainment is based upon curiosity and exploration of the inner environment of feelings and desires. This seems to be pleasurable even when the feelings and desires in question are not, such as feelings of sadness elicited by tear-jerkers, and feelings of fear elicited by horror shows.
The attraction of silly love songs suggests that we have a need to explore, not only sexual and aggressive feelings and desires; but also feelings of attachment, affection and love; and feelings associated with the loss of love: rebuff, rejection, betrayal and loss. As the song says, love isn't silly at all.
[1] from the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
[2] (c) 1989 by Doug Vaughn & Pete Samson.
[3] (c) 1983 by Lionel Richie.
[4] (c) 1983 by Eric Martin
[5] (c) 1983 by Linda Ronstadt.
[6] (c) 1983 by ZZ Top.
[7] (c) 1983 by The Rolling Stones.
[8] (c) 1983 by Big Country.
