Robert Turnage, Tom Ashkenazi and I had the opportunity to conduct research at the University of California, Berkeley during the spring of 2022. When picking a topic to research, I recalled a moment from several months prior, while I was doing some last minute Christmas shopping. I spent several hours at a mall which was playing Christmas music. I've always hated Christmas music (yes I'm a grinch) and I was struck by how happy the songs sounded. How could happy music make someone feel such negative emotion?

This experience inspired us to conduct research on whether "high valence" (i.e. happy-sounding) music had an effect on mood - independent of characteristics like preferred genre, mood prior to hearing music, etc. does happy music make people happy?

The paper, here, goes into much more detail on experimental design, methodology, and analysis, but in case you were curious, we saw decently-sized, but statistically insignificant increases to mood after hearing happy music.