A new study suggests that sad music might actually arouse positive emotions. The finding helps to explain why people enjoy listening to sad music, say Ai Kawakami and her colleagues from Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan. Ai Kawakami and her colleagues asked 44 volunteers, including both musicians and nonspecialists, to listen to two pieces of sad music and one piece of happy music. Each participant was required to use a set of keywords to rate both their perception(观念) of the music and their own emotional state. The sad pieces of music included Glinka’s La Separation in F minor and Blumenfeld’s Etude Sur Mer in G minor. The happy music piece was Granados’s Allegro de Concierto in G major. To control the “happy” effect of major key, they also played the minor key(小调) pieces in major key, and vise versa. The researchers explained that sad music aroused contradictory emotions because the participants of the study tended to feel sad to be more tragic and less romantic than they felt themselves while listening to it. “ In general, sad music causes sadness in listeners, and sadness is regarded as an unpleasant emotion. If sad music actually arouses only unpleasant emotion, we would not listen to it,” the researchers wrote in the study. “Music that is believed as sad actually causes romantic emotion as well as sad emotion.And people, regardless of their musical training, experience this ambivalent(矛盾的) emotion to listen to the sad music,” added the researchers. Also, unlike sadness in daily life, sadness experienced through art actually feels pleasant, possibly because the latter does not cause an actual threat to our safety. This could help people to deal with their negative emotions in daily life, concluded the authors. “Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. Therefore, we can even enjoy unpleasant emotion such as sadness. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion aroused through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion,” they added. 小题1: People enjoy listening to sad music because _______.
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