What Personality Reveals About Musical Choices

From the Piano Sonata No. 13 (Beethoven) Op. 27, No. 1. in E-flat major (Quasi una fantasia).

Source: Roberto, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Do you prefer music written in a major or a minor key? It turns out this preference might just depend on your personality. So, let’s start at the beginning and look at what personality is.

Defining Personality

The APA defines personality as “the enduring configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns.” (American Psychological Association, 2018). We can see personality in any number of things we do, from whether or not we like spicy food to the characteristics we seek in a partner, and even a preference for music in a particular key.

Hans and Sylvia Eysenck proposed a very influential model of personality based on biology and genetics (Psychologists World, 2026). The Eysencks proposed a “trait model” of personality. Traits are stable characteristics of a person, like the way they think or behave, that distinguish that person from everyone else. Traits are often arranged on a continuum from high to low levels of that characteristic at either end. A given individual might show a lot of a trait, or only a little of it. The real question for researchers quickly became how many traits might there be.

The Eysencks proposed what has come to be called PEN theory, suggesting our personalities were composed of three traits:

• Psychoticism/Normality. Someone characterized by high Psychoticism might be irresponsible, unwilling to accept social norms, and needing gratification without regard to consequences. A low score on this trait would indicate the opposite trends in behavior.
• Neuroticism/Emotional Stability. Individuals who show high levels of Neuroticism tend to be anxious, they worry a lot about things others would dismiss as minor, and they tend to focus on the negative in life. Personalities at the other end of this continuum tend to be more emotionally stable, to be calmer in a stressful situation, and to be more tolerant of both their own failings and those of others.
• Extroversion/Introversion. Extroverts tend to be social, outgoing, and at ease in groups, while introverts tend to be quiet, prefer solitude, and often avoid large groups.

Eysenck linked extroversion and introversion to resting levels of cortical arousal. He also proposed that each of us differs in how much cortical stimulation we need or seek out to be comfortable. That level of arousal, termed hedonic tone, is different for each of us. Extroverts tend to have low levels of cortical arousal, which motivates them to seek out stimulation from the environment around them. Introverts, on the other hand, have higher levels of cortical arousal, and so don’t need (and even avoid) stimulation from the external world.

The Big Five model of personality

Source: Eganos, CC BY-SA 4..0 via Wikimedia Commons

A related trait theory, now called the Big Five theory, suggests that personalities are composed of five traits, again arranged on continuums. They are Emotional Stability vs. Instability, Extroversion vs. Introversion, Openness to Experience vs. Conventionality, Agreeableness vs. Antagonism, and Conscientiousness vs. Disinhibition (Widiger and Crego, 2019). Notice the overlap between Eysenck’s three dimensions and the Big Five model. There is a lot of agreement, even amidst the disagreement, about how many traits there might be.

Personality and Musical Preferences

So, back to musical preferences. Greenberg, Kosinski, Stillwell, Monterio, Levitin, and Rentfrow (2016) examined how personality characteristics influenced musical preferences. They wanted to avoid categorizing the musical pieces used in their study according to genre or musical style because of the potential for misunderstanding of these kinds of terms. So, they first asked 76 judges with no formal training in music to rate a large set of snippets of music from a number of genres along a set of 38 dimensions or attributes. These evaluations revealed three essential components: arousal (intense vs gentle or calming), valence (happy vs. sad), and depth (inspiring and poetic vs. danceable, party music).

They then recruited 9,454 volunteers to listen to 50 excerpts of musical pieces and rate their preferences for each piece using the three components of music determined in the first study. They were also asked to take an assessment of their personalities using the Big Five model. They found that personality predicted musical preference over and above demographic measures like age, education, and gender. Interestingly, one characteristic where differences were seen in preference was for the arousing aspects of music. Extroverts tended to prefer music that was stimulating, while introverts tended to prefer relaxing or calm music. Eysenck’s model would predict both of these results.

In a fascinating study of how music affects reward and pleasure in the brain, Suzuki, Okamura et al. (2008) asked volunteers to listen to concordant, discordant, major, and minor chords. Both major and minor concordant chords were rated as beautiful (major chords were rated slightly higher), while discordant major and minor chords were rated as ugly. Major and minor chords also affected quite different circuits in the brain. Minor chords activated brain regions that play an important role in reward and emotion processing, while equally beautiful major chords activated regions associated with orderly and coherent information processing.

In their Arousal Regulation Model of Affective Disorders, Hegerl, Sander & Hensch (2016, Chapter 12) suggest that we often use our own behavior to regulate our neural arousal. Perhaps understanding how music affects our emotional responses and our neural arousal may help clinicians develop more effective ways to use music to treat mood and emotional disorders. It might also shed light on an activity almost all of us find to be pleasurable.