Personality & Emotional States: Understanding Users' Music Listening Needs.

Music plays an important part in people’s lives to regulate their emotions throughout the day. We conducted an online user study to investigate how the emotional state relates to the use of emotionally laden music. We found among 359 participants that they in general prefer emotionally laden music that correspond with their emotional state. However, when looking at personality traits, different patterns occurred. We found that when in a negative emotional state, those who scored high on openness, extraversion, and agreeableness tend to cheer themselves up with happy music, while those who scored high on neuroticism tend to increase their worry with sad music. With our results we show general patterns of music usage, but also individual differences. Our results contribute to the improvement of applications such as recommender systems in order to provide tailored recommendations based on users’ personality and emotional state.