Groovin’ to the Cultural Beat: Preferences for Danceable Music Represent Cultural Affordances for High-Arousal Negative Emotions

Music is a product of culture. Cross-cultural examinations of music features can reveal novel information about the cultural psychological processes involved in shaping music preferences. The exploratory section (Studies 1 and 2) identified differences in music preferences through machine learning of East-Asian and Western popular music on Spotify (combined N = 1006644). In interpreting these results, we developed a theory on danceability as a music feature, that represents cultural affordances for high arousal emotions. Subsequent confirmatory studies (Studies 3-5, combined Nsongs = 3343, Nparticipants = 495, Ncountries = 60) tested this theory by examining danceability and the role of emotion in music preferences. Specifically, we found that danceability represents cultural affordances for high-arousal negative (HAN) emotions: societies with greater HAN emotion prevalence generally prefer listening to more danceable music. Consistently, this was also observed more in independent individuals and culturally looser countries. Using evidence from Japanese and American participants (Study 5), we propose a mechanism through discharge regulation in music: Cultures with looser cultural norms would also have more experiences of HAN emotions in daily life. Discharge regulation, or listening to music to cathartically release HAN emotions, would then skew music preferences towards high arousal (danceable) music to facilitate this cathartic HAN downregulation. These findings have implications for cross-cultural research by demonstrating that music features, being widely accessible and almost universally perceived, can quantify cultural tendencies towards affective (HAN emotion) norms beyond commonly-used self-report paradigms.