Love it or loathe it, this is why the annual barrage of holly, jolly tunes has some power over people's psyche.
The psychology behind our love of Christmas moviesIn addition to being big business, there are some psychological drivers behind why so many of us feel drawn to this musical genre like ants to a gingerbread house. “A lot of Christmas repertoire is very nostalgic. We listen to much older music [now] than we listen to in the other 11 months,” says
, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts. “So, it’s that one time of the year where we are prepared to go back to this old repertoire.”One of Bennett’s research interests is the meta characteristics of holiday songs. He’s used both machine and human analysis to create a small database ofto identify common patterns. While performing what’s called a “corpus analysis” on the tracks, he found nine recurring themes in the lyrics.
Timelessness is one reason why you might see just as much Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald on a holiday playlist as Michael Bublé and Ariana Grande. According to Bennett, pop music is socially functional, meaning young people in particular use it in whatever way they want to, whether that’s falling in love, wallowing in heartbreak, or dancing with friends. But the function changes a bit as they head home for the holidays and share the listening experience with their older relatives.
Often, playing Christmas music in the background helps set that scene. But what stimulates those fuzzy feelings in the human brain?, a neuroscientist at Missouri University of Science and Technology who studies autobiographical memory and how memories are evoked by music. Some of the future clinical applications of her work include studying how music could potentially help people with Alzheimer’s disease recover some memories.
For Christmas music, Belfi agrees that our love for it all comes back to nostalgia. “I think that a lot of the reason why people love Christmas music is more about those associations than the actual sounds itself,” she tells. “There are Frank Sinatra versions of these songs that have been around for decades that our parents and grandparents and kids listen to. That is perhaps unique to Christmas music.
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