The Fall of Emos - Study Deems Emotional Music as Uncool

A new piece of research out of Australia has revealed that music which expresses more emotion than listeners feel is likely to be uncool.

The study involved Dr Schubert, a music psychologist, playing participants pieces of instrumental music, asking them their response to it and to determine what emotion the music was trying to express.

”I took the difference between the rating for the expressed emotion and the rating for the felt emotion,” Dr Schubert said. “The smaller the gap between people’s ‘felt’ emotion and music’s ‘expressed’ emotion, the more they enjoy it.”

Dr Schubert refers to this difference as the ‘Differential Affect Gap’ – or ‘DAG factor’. He noted that “If a piece of music is thought to be daggy or not cool, generally it seems that those pieces will be rated as expressing too much emotion, inappropriately too much emotion for that listener,” he said.

I guess this confirms what we knew all along, emos are simply not cool.