Sounds Like You: How Personality Shapes Music Preference—and Mental States

We all have that one friend who unwinds with drum and bass while another swears by Bach. Some of us thrive on high-energy playlists; others find focus only with ambient textures. Have you ever wondered if these musical preferences aren’t just random quirks? What if your go-to playlist reveals something fundamental about who you are?

Over the past decade, psychologists and data scientists have been exploring a powerful idea: your personality may be one of the strongest predictors of the music you love. And with the rise of neuroadaptive sound platforms and EEG-enabled mental fitness devices, that insight isn’t just interesting—it could help you train your brain more effectively.

The Spotify Study That Changed the Conversation

In 2020, Spotify released findings from one of the largest music-personality studies to date. By combining Big Five personality assessments with listener behavior across millions of users, they discovered a clear pattern: music taste can reliably signal personality traits, and vice versa.

Their models showed that users high in Openness preferred diverse, complex, and novel music—genres like classical, jazz, and experimental electronic. Extraverts gravitated toward energetic, rhythmic tracks—think pop, dance, and hip-hop. Conscientious listeners favored upbeat and structured songs, while Agreeable users leaned into warm, melodic tunes. Those higher in Neuroticism? They often listened to music for emotional regulation, especially introspective or moody tracks.

Spotify’s research didn’t just replicate academic studies—it turbocharged them with massive, real-world data collected from a globally diverse user base in everyday listening environments. Unlike lab-based studies, this dataset captured natural behavior at scale, allowing for highly generalizable insights into how personality traits and streaming habits align. For the first time, personality profiling and streaming habits were shown to be mutually predictive at scale. And it opened the door to a new kind of question: if personality shapes musical taste, can music shape mental states?

Psychology and Neuroscience Back It Up

Spotify’s findings align with a growing body of peer-reviewed research exploring the connection between the Big Five personality traits and musical preference. A foundational study by Rentfrow and Gosling (2003) established that individuals with high Openness consistently prefer complex and novel genres like classical and jazz, while Extraverts show a clear preference for energetic and rhythmic music such as pop and electronic dance tracks. Subsequent studies, including Greenberg et al. (2015), expanded on this by showing that musical preferences are strongly tied to how individuals emotionally and cognitively engage with sound—a process shaped by their underlying personality traits.

Researchers have also used EEG and fMRI to explore the neural mechanisms behind these preferences. One study by Park et al. (2013) found that individuals high in Neuroticism exhibited heightened activation in the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex when exposed to emotionally evocative music, indicating a stronger emotional response. In contrast, people high in Openness showed increased activity in the default mode network while listening to abstract or unconventional compositions, suggesting greater cognitive engagement.

The concept of cortical arousal also helps explain these links. According to Eysenck's theory, extraverts have lower baseline cortical arousal and seek external stimulation to achieve optimal alertness, making them more likely to favor upbeat or intense music. Introverts, with naturally higher arousal levels, often prefer softer, more subdued genres. This arousal-based preference has been demonstrated in task-performance studies: for instance, Furnham and Strbac (2002) showed that extraverts perform well with background music, while introverts tend to be distracted by it.

A second mechanism involves reward system activation. Research by Park et al. (2013) using fMRI found that individuals with high levels of Neuroticism show greater activation in areas like the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex when exposed to happy, uplifting music. This suggests that emotionally evocative music may provide an amplified sense of reward for listeners prone to anxiety or mood fluctuations, acting as a powerful form of emotional relief.

Finally, personality also shapes how we process emotions through music. The same study found that high-Agreeableness individuals activated empathy-related regions—such as the medial prefrontal cortex—more strongly when listening to emotionally rich music, while high-Openness individuals exhibited stronger engagement in the default mode network when exposed to abstract or novel music. These patterns suggest that people high in these traits are more neurologically tuned to respond to specific emotional or cognitive qualities in music, which could explain their genre preferences and how they use music for reflection or connection.

Together, these findings show that personality doesn’t just influence what kinds of music we like—it affects how we neurologically respond to music, how we use it for emotional regulation, and which types of sound are most likely to support focus, creativity, or relaxation.

To help visualize how different personality traits map onto musical tendencies, consider the following summary drawn from peer-reviewed literature, including Rentfrow & Gosling (2003) and Greenberg et al. (2015):

Rather than viewing these preferences as fixed, researchers emphasize their utility for personalization. High-Neuroticism listeners may gain more emotional regulation from calming tracks, whereas high-Openness individuals may derive the most cognitive stimulation from complex musical structures. These trait-linked inclinations don’t just explain taste—they point toward what kinds of music might be most effective for different psychological goals, from relaxation to focus to emotional processing.

Implications for Mental Fitness

This personality-music link has profound applications. For example, one study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2007) found that tailoring musical choices based on individual personality traits not only enhanced emotional regulation but also improved self-reported cognitive performance. Similarly, experimental platforms using Big Five profiles have shown early success in improving mood, attention, and relaxation outcomes through personalized playlists. These results suggest that understanding your psychological profile isn't just a matter of taste—it can be a roadmap to more effective and rewarding listening experiences. If we know what types of music suit different psychological profiles, we can begin using music not just to reflect our moods, but to shift them intentionally.

For example:

• A neurotic listener trying to unwind might respond best to calming instrumental music with slow tempos and soft textures.
  
• An extravert looking to focus could benefit from energetic, rhythm-driven tracks to sustain alertness.
  
• A high-Openness individual might find experimental ambient or nature-infused soundscapes more engaging during meditation.
  
• Introverts may focus best with minimal, non-lyrical music—or even silence.
  

The future of mental fitness is personalized. And personality is the missing layer.

From Insight to Application

Here’s a few simple steps through which you apply these insights and figure out the optimal playlist for your brain:

• Take a Big Five personality test (many are free online).
  
• Reflect on your favorite genres and how they make you feel during different activities: focusing, relaxing, sleeping.
  
• Build playlists not just based on taste, but based on function: Which music energizes you? Which soothes? Which overwhelms?
  
• Experiment with using different genres to target specific mental states. Keep track of what works—and when.
  

Your personality is a compass. It not only points toward the music that resonates with you emotionally, but also helps chart a path for using music as a tool for self-regulation, focus, and recovery. Understanding your psychological wiring gives you a map—and with the right playlist, you can steer your mind exactly where you want it to go. And when it comes to mental fitness, music is one of the best tools to navigate by.

Where enophones Fit In

eno is a mental fitness platform powered by brainwave data. Using EEG-enabled headphones, it detects your brain’s electrical activity and translates it into real-time feedback. For instance, if your brain exhibits elevated beta wave activity—a sign of heightened alertness or stress—the eno platform can adjust the audio it delivers, shifting toward calming, lower-frequency soundscapes designed to guide you toward a more relaxed, focused, or meditative state. With EEG-enabled headphones and adaptive audio neurostimulation, enophones allow you to train your brain with soundscapes designed to match and modulate your mental state in real time.

Whether you’re aiming for focus, calm, or creativity, enophones respond to your EEG patterns and help guide you into your target brainwave zone. The team at eno is actively exploring ways to incorporate personality-based insights into the platform—so that over time, users can discover which types of soundscapes work best for their individual traits and goals. Whether you're aiming to wind down, focus deeply, or boost your creativity, the goal is to help you find the right sound for what you need, when you need it.

In other words: music that doesn’t just fit you. Music that guides you.

*The information in this article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before starting new wellness practices.

Bibliography

• Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
  
• Greenberg, D. M., et al. (2015). The Song Is You: Preferences for musical attribute dimensions reflect personality. Social Psychological and Personality Science.
  
• Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Furnham, A. (2007). Personality and Music: Can traits explain how people use music in everyday life? British Journal of Psychology.
  
• Park, J., et al. (2013). Personality traits modulate neural responses to emotion in music: An fMRI study. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
  
• Spotify Research Blog (2022). Predicting personality traits from musical preferences using streaming data.
  

Suggested Reading

• Music and Personality – Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Music
• Spotify's Personality-Prediction Research Summary
• The Science of Musical Preferences – Psychology Today
• Big Five Personality Traits – Simply Psychology
• Personality and Music Use – Frontiers in Psychology