Topic summary
Earworms
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Earworm.
Incidence and causes
Earworms are not related only to music with lyrics; in a research experiment conducted by Ella Moeck and her colleagues in an attempt to find out if the positive or negative feeling of a piece of music affected earworms caused by that piece, they used only instrumental music. Her experiment determined that all participants experienced a similar quantity of earworms, regardless of the emotional valence, although the quality of the earworm did vary. The earworms born from the negatively valenced music brought about more distress and occurred less frequently than those produced by positively valenced music.