It may have been Californian punks The Offspring that sang about having no self esteem, but it turns out it may be heavy metal that inspires low confidence levels.
Apparently exposing yourself to the heavy riffage of Metallica, Slipknot, and Slayer can lower self-esteem.
That’s if you believe the results of a new psychological study analysing the personality traits of particular music fans to see what inspires them raising the devil’s horns aloft and headbanging their way into a death circle.
Researchers at Westminster University, led by psychologist Viren Swami, surveyed 219 women and 195 men in the UK about their personality after listening to and rating 10 heavy metal tracks by bands such as Overkill, Enslaved, Disturbed, and Cradle of Filth, as Australian Popular Science (via Pacific Standard) reports.
Professor Swami and the team’s describe the headbangin soundtrack as being characterised by “heavy guitar riffs, double-bass drumming, breakdowns (slow, intense passages that are conducive to moshing), and overall loudness.” Adding that it tends to use complicated rhythms, extreme tempos, and vocals typified by “shouting, shrieking, and growling.”
The 414 participants were also measured through the survey on how they matched up with the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of psychology (not to be confused with metal’s ‘Big Four’), namely the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. “Rather than stereotyping fans as deviant, antisocial, or violent, it may be more fruitful to understand the psychological needs that contemporary heavy metal fill for some individuals…”
The results, published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts journal, found that “openness to experience” was a major factor in enjoying heavy metal, as Professor Swami describes, because it is “intense, engaging, and challenging,” but surprisingly, that those with a strong preference for metal were more likely to have lower self-esteem.
To offset this perceived lack of confidence however, the study speculates that “the catharsis afforded by heavy metal may, in turn, help boost self-worth and promote positive self-evaluations among those with otherwise low self-esteem.”
Unsurprisingly, metal fans were found to dislike authority figures, had a lower-than-average threshold for ‘religiosity’, and a higher-than-average craving for uniqueness. “It is possible that this association is driven by underlying attitudes towards authority, which may include religious authorities,” postulate the authors of the study.
Professor Swami and his colleagues however are keen to emphasise that they don’t want to use the results from a few hundred British metal heads to perpetuate stereotypes about the genre’s extensive community (in the way a Netherlands study did, stating metal encouraged delinquency).
“Rather than stereotyping fans as deviant, antisocial, or violent, it may be more fruitful to understand the psychological needs that contemporary heavy metal fill for some individuals,” the research concludes, and more broadly “may help scholars to fully understand why some individuals are attracted to non-mainstream music.” (Do you really need further study to tell you that metal and Miley don’t mix?)
Interestingly, a separate Scottish study found a strong correlation between the personalities of heavy metal lovers and classical music aficionados.
Unlike the Westminster University research, a study from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University found that both metal and classical fans tended to be creative, introverted, yet at ease with themselves, as well as sharing a borderline-obsessive affection for their genre compared to others, as The Daily Mail reports.
The Scottish study looked broader as well, taking answers from online interviews gleaned from China to Chile, and broke down metal into broader sub-genres, such as death metal, thrash metal, Christian metal, glam metal, and neo-classical metal.
Other stereotypical traits the Edinburgh researchers concluded were that jazz lovers were creative, outgoing, and chilled out, country and western fans are hard-working, reggae fans are laidback, punk fans are aggressive and creative, while it was indie music lovers that were the ones that lack self-esteem. Cue Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and Beck’s ‘Loser’ on the stereo…
