ABSTRACT
Liking or disliking a piece of music is perhaps our most common affective response to music (e.g., Brattico & Jacobsen, 2009). But why do we like the music that we like? Although certain general features of music—such as its familiarity and complexity—can be used to explain why we like or dislike certain pieces of music, our music preferences are largely shaped by our social and cultural surroundings. Consistent with the idea that individual differences are inherent to matters of taste, music preferences tend to vary greatly from one individual to the next. In fact, it is a commonly held belief that an individual’s music preferences can reveal salient information about their personality to others (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003). Indeed, empirical findings have established that there is a consistent pattern of correlations between our personality dispositions and the kinds of music we enjoy listening to. Different personality traits are associated with different emotional, social, and cognitive needs and motives (e.g., Olson & Weber, 2004). Importantly, music listening has the ability to fulfill a wide variety of functions in everyday life (e.g., Sloboda, O’Neill, & Ivaldi, 2001; North, Hargreaves, & Hargreaves, 2004), and consequently it has been postulated that people may enjoy listening to the kinds of music that best help them to fulfill their psychological needs (e.g., Chamorro-Premuzic, Fagan, & Furnham, 2010). Taken together, music can function to both reflect and reinforce aspects of people’s personalities, self-views, and values. In this chapter, I will first outline some general principles and theories that have been proposed to account for listeners’ liking and disliking responses to music. I will then introduce some key concepts from personality psychology before proceeding to explore the contribution of personality traits to music preferences in more detail.
