Music can raise someone’s mood, get them excited, or make them calm and relaxed. It also – and this is important – allows us to feel nearly or possibly all emotions that we experience in our lives. The possibilities are endless.
It is a crucial element of everyday life. People spend hours listening to it and billions of dollars buying it. Yet despite the pervasiveness of music, mainstream social-personality psychology has hardly given any attention to this universal social phenomenon.
All of this is, of course, backed by research that shows that it can affect our emotions in different ways. Happy, upbeat causes our brains to produce chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which evokes feelings of joy, whereas calming music relaxes the mind and the body.
It has the ability to evoke powerful emotional responses such as chills and thrills in listeners. Positive emotions dominate musical experiences. Pleasurable music may lead to the release of neurotransmitters associated with reward, such as dopamine. Listening to music is an easy way to alter mood or relieve stress
