The Pursuit of Unhappiness: Using Negative Music for Eudaimonic Goals Across Adolescence and Adulthood

Abstract

What does it take to live a good life? Although it is considered healthy to down-regulate negative emotions, one context in which people can benefit from approaching uncomfortable emotions is when pursuing eudaimonic goals (i.e., goals that involve achieving personal growth, acting in line with values, and finding meaning in life). Such “contrahedonic instrumental emotion regulation” (i.e., choosing to feel bad to reach specific goals) may be particularly important in adolescence, a stage of life where people actively develop their sense of self and personal values. Here, we examine this question in the context of music, a highly naturalistic source of emotion. We ask: Do adolescents use negative music to pursue eudaimonic goals, and if so, how does this habit relate to mental health? We hypothesized that (i) adolescents would be more likely than adults to choose negative music to pursue eudaimonic goals, (ii) individuals with higher levels of internalizing symptoms would be more likely to choose negative music to pursue eudaimonic goals, and (iii) this relationship would be moderated by age. We first established that the stimuli in our task evoked the intended emotions and goals with a pilot study (N = 60, aged 13 to 30). For the main study, participants (ages 13 to 30, N = 53) performed a music selection task where they were asked how useful they believed 12 songs (3 happy, 3 sad, 3 angry, 3 calm) would be in preparing them for two scenarios with a clear eudaimonic goal. In line with our first hypothesis, (i) we found that younger participants perceive negative music as more useful in eudaimonic scenarios compared to older participants. However, (ii) higher internalizing symptoms were associated with lower perceived usefulness of negative music in eudaimonic contexts. Finally, (iii) perceived usefulness of negative music was more strongly associated with internalizing symptoms in older participants. These findings support prior work showing that negative emotions can serve context-specific functions, while also highlighting that their perceived utility for promoting growth may vary across development.