ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some general principles and theories that have been proposed to account for listeners' liking and disliking responses to music. It provides some key concepts from personality psychology before proceeding to explores the contribution of personality traits to music preferences. Music's "arousal potential" is positively associated with features such as tempo, volume, and complexity, and negatively associated with familiarity. Empirical work has shown that people often use their music preferences to communicate information about their personalities to strangers. In addition to the more "global" approach to individual differences represented by the Five-Factor Model of personality, other, more specific traits such as Empathy have also been investigated in the context of music preferences. These studies are grouped in terms of their approach to music preferences: Genre-based approaches, Emotion-focused approaches, and Functional approaches. The chapter shows that people's personality traits are consistently reflected in their music preferences—regardless whether they are characterized in terms of genres or emotional attributes.
