A paper published in the Journal of Intelligence has found that people who listen to music with less emotionally positive lyrics appear to have slightly higher levels of projected intelligence.
Scientists tracked the smartphone activity of 185 participants over five months, creating a custom app to check the kinds of music they listened to.
The researchers also asked the people involved to take a test, which measured their fluid reasoning, vocabulary comprehension, and math knowledge. Combined, these gave the study authors a way to measure their cognitive ability.
By the end of the analysis, which involved advanced machine learning tasked with finding links between participants’ music taste and their cognitive test scores, they found “small but reliable associations”.
Lyrics seemed to matter most
The participants listened to 58,247 songs overall.
English (US)