By Calley Jones
For some, having a song stuck in your head can keep you awake at night. For others, the experience can generate happy memories or provide a source of strength.
These intrusive tunes — called earworms — are relatively common phenomena. Nearly 90 percent of us experience them at least once a week, according to a 2011 study. Although earworms carry a bad reputation for being distracting, annoying, or downright obstructive to daily life, some people actually enjoy the songs playing in their heads.
“It’s not surprising that they’re, on average, pleasant experiences, because we’re humans and we self-expose,” said Andrea Halpern, PhD, a psychologist at Bucknell University and an expert on musical imagery. Because we usually control our song choice, and how often we listen, we’re more apt to recall music that we like. “[Earworms] are memories. They act like other memories,” she says, going on to explain that the more often and more recently you’ve done something, like listening to a certain song, the more likely you are to remember it.
Then what causes some people to react to earworms so negatively? New research from Tokyo Gakugei University shows that the difference may be influenced by certain personality traits, musical expertise, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
In the study, published in June in PLoS One, psychologists surveyed 101 college students to determine how often they experienced earworm during a seven-day period, and how the experiences affected the students’ emotions. Students also filled out questionnaires, assessing various personality traits, musical expertise, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Of these individual differences participant’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, as well as their musical experience, proved most influential, says Takahiro Sekiguchi, Ph.D., a psychologist, and lead author of the study. “This phenomenon means that we cannot always control our own thoughts,” says Sekiguchi. “Psychology has studied only the aspects of the human mind that can be controlled intentionally, but in such a case, it has studied only half of the human mind.”
The researchers were particularly interested in the link between earworm and obsessivecompulsive tendencies. Obsessions are repetitive thoughts, urges, or mental images that can bring on anxiety. Compulsions are repetitive urges or behaviors people experience as a result of these obsessions.
For example, if touching germs causes anxiety, then washing hands relieves that anxiety. According to Steven Whiteside, PhD, a psychologist at Mayo Clinic, the relief from handwashing gets automatically reinforced until it interferes with daily life. “It strengthens this belief that the only way to feel better — the only way to feel safe — is to wash my hands,” he says.
As both obsessive-compulsive tendencies and earworm encompass uncontrolled thoughts, the researchers in the PLoS One study looked for a link. Previous studies have tried to correlate the two, including a 2014 study from the United Kingdom. While this study showed that people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies experienced earworm more frequently, the UK work relied on participants to report earworms they remembered. The current study used a more real-time sampling method.
Leveraging a technique known as the experience sampling method, researchers asked students to download a smartphone app, which asked about their earworms at random intervals. Six times a day, for one week, app notifications asked students whether they had an earworm at that moment, and if so, how they felt about it.
The researchers found that participants with stronger obsessive-compulsive tendencies experienced earworm more often than those without. Specifically, students susceptible to intrusive thoughts characteristic of obsession had more earworms, over the one-week period, than their peers.
Additionally, students with more obsessive-compulsive tendencies, especially compulsive hand washing, were less likely to favor the song playing through their head, or to report the experience as ‘pleasant.’ The authors suggested this may be due to these students’ preexisting tendency to view uncontrolled thoughts as negative.
Halpern, however, cautions that calling this a cause-and-effect relationship may be jumping the gun. “The authors kept talking about the effect of neuroticism and the effect of handwashing,” she says. “These are correlations. We do not know if they are causal.”
Next up, the team plans to address the low number of unpleasant earworms they found during the study. Although the researchers found a clear correlation between obsessive-compulsion and fewer enjoyable earworms, they were surprised that only four percent of earworms in this study negatively impacted a student’s mood. Thus, the search continues for what causes the truly annoying earworms which shape the classic stigma.
Calley Jones is a molecular biology Ph.D. student at the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She has written for Mayo Clinic’s research magazine Discovery’s Edge, and plans to continue writing about basic biology and health sciences. Follow her on Twitter @CalleyJSciWri or email her at Calley.J.Jones@gmail.com.
This story was produced as part of NASW's David Perlman Summer Mentoring Program, which was launched in 2020 by our Education Committee. Jones was mentored by Jeanne Erdmann.
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