Motivation, emotions, and stress: interconnections and effects

¶ … music I listen to. The terms from Chapters 11 and 12 in the text are unlikely to appear in music but for the most part the themes will be reflected. The central theme of each song was assigned to one of six categories: love/emotions, sex, food, work, stress, other. The occurrences of each category can be found in Appendix A. The mean for the group was 17.667 occurrences. The median for the group was 12.5. There was no mode for these six categories.

Only two themes occurred at a level greater than the mean (love/emotion and other) but three occurred at a higher frequency than the median (love/emotion, other, and sex). Given the type of music that I generally listen to (hip hop and pop) these figures are not surprising. The 'other' category was not broken down formally, but tended to be about power and success, as distinct from work or about drugs/alcohol. These are frequent themes in hip hop music. Food, on the other hand, had zero songs dedicated to it. As popular as food is, there are few songs in general about this subject matter. Its inclusion as a category ranks as curious for this reason, especially given the omissions of two popular subject matters that individually would have ranked above the median.

The love/emotion category was the most popular of the categories by far in terms of theme. This category covered a wide range of subjects that we study in psychology, including rationalization, projection, testosterone, estrogen, incentive, motivation, defense mechanisms and identification. Love and emotion cover a large number of human conditions, so it is not surprising that the way these manifest in popular music is so nuanced. The same story (falling in love or falling out of love) is told many ways, from a number of different perspectives. The popularity of these themes reflects their universality and the number of perspectives used to explore the themes I think reflects how complex they are, how essential they are to the human condition and how important it is to explore them.

Sexuality is another common theme in music. We see in the songs studied testosterone and estrogen, the sexual response cycle, psychosexual images and sexual orientation issues. These treatments of the same basic thing are again complex, ranging from purely physical explorations of the subject to the deep-rooted psychological attributes of sex. Self-esteem and denial are also wrapped up in this subject in some of the songs. This again reflects our need to understand our sexual selves, in particular as distinct from our emotional/loving selves.

In the other category, power proved a major theme. Self-esteem, self-serving bias, defense mechanisms, ego, superego, the spotlight effect, achievement motivation and projection are all components of this theme that emerge in the music. The need for power reflects a desire for achievement that we all have and the need to feel important in this world, perhaps explaining why this theme is so popular. Its popularity in this form of music dominated by African-Americans could reflect the opportunity to achieve the American dream after centuries of being denied that dream. It is an important aspect of the culture.