"I guess that's why they call it the blues": Personality and the interplay between emotion and genre.

This article investigates the associations between personality traits, as defined by the Big Five model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), and naturally occurring music listening behaviors using Last.fm data enriched with social tags related to musical genres and emotions. By clustering genre tags and mapping emotion-related tags onto the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS), the study reveals that Extraversion correlates with preferences for energetic genres like Hip-Hop, Rap, and Techno/House accompanied by positive, high-arousal emotions such as Transcendence and Nostalgia. Neuroticism is linked to a preference for mellow, atmospheric genres like Neo-pop/Dream-pop/Shoegaze co-occurring with low-arousal, positively valenced emotions such as Tenderness and Sadness, while Openness is associated with Jazz subgenres and diverse musical styles. The research highlights the nuanced interplay between genre and emotion in music preferences and suggests that personality influences music listening both in trait-congruent and trait-incongruent ways. Limitations include a predominantly male sample and the inability to distinguish between perceived and felt emotions in social tags, with recommendations for future studies to incorporate additional musical and physiological data.