What do love songs say about romantic relationships today? – Deseret News

The American love song is in danger, an NPR spokesman said Wednesday during a radio broadcast that also featured a study from Brigham Young University.

It might be more accurate to put it this way:

The American love song is problematic.

A team at BYU examined the lyrics of the most popular love songs of 2019 and found that 86% of them addressed insecure attachment.

For example, the research team said that the No. 33 song this year demonstrated both anxious and avoidant attachment styles. The song “Youngblood” by 5 Seconds of Summer includes the line “You push and push, and I pull away, pull away from you.”

Romantic attachment style is a key indicator of how well a relationship is working, and music may influence the attachment style of young listeners at a time when their music consumption is skyrocketing and they are experiencing their first romances, BYU researchers said as they published their study in a 2022 issue of the journal Psychology of Music.

Attachment theory is a developmental psychology explanation of the emotional bonds and relationships between people. Some people have secure attachments, others fall into three categories of insecure attachments.

The BYU team analyzed 87 of the top 100 songs – 13 of which were not about love, such as “Baby Shark.” Of the 87 songs, five were coded as neutral and 8% depicted secure attachment.

According to PsyPost, researchers divided the 86% who had insecure attachment into three categories:

• Avoidant attachment (distancing to prevent emotional closeness), 33.33%.
• Anxious attachment (constantly seeks validation and attention), 27.59%.
• Anxious attachment (strongly desires closeness but becomes distrustful and anxious when connection is offered), 25.29%.

Songs in the study included “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish, “Shallow” by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, and “ME!” by Taylor Swift. The BYU team judged all of these songs to represent insecure attachment.

The team coded Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” as a representation of an avoidant attachment style, lead researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells told NPR.

Another indication of problematic music came last summer, when “sad” was the most searched term by Generation Z listeners on the music app Spotify, according to a press release.

Jorgensen-Wells was a BYU student at the time of the study. She worked with another doctoral student, Janna Pickett, and BYU professor Sarah Coyne.

They noticed big differences in the music genres.

“Rap, hip-hop and R&B were more likely to be about sexuality, whereas pop was more likely to be about love,” Jorgensen-Wells told NPR.

The BYU team said, “Parents, teens and educators should pay attention to the song lyrics that teens listen to and work together to ensure that teens process the music’s romantic messages in a positive way.”

There were other findings.

According to PsyPost, most of the songs studied by the BYU team contained at least one sexualizing element. These songs tended to demonstrate the avoidant attachment style.

Songs without a sexualizing effect were more likely to convey a feeling of security and were less likely to lead to avoidance behavior.

The genres also played a role.

Pop songs were less avoidant but not more secure. Rap ​​and hip hop songs were more avoidant and less anxious, with singers saying they did not need emotional closeness and could cope on their own.

Rap and hip-hop stars need love, author Jesse Washington told NPR.

“They do, but they won’t tell you,” he said, because love is soft and vulnerable and hip-hop is about being seen as tough.

The BYU study found no causal link between listening to certain types of music and adopting a romantic attachment style.

The NPR report also looked at a second study that found that the themes of song lyrics in popular music have shifted from love to lust over the past 40 years.

“The study conducted a comprehensive analysis of the top 40 songs from Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 singles chart for all five years between 1971 and 2011,” according to NeuroscienceNews.com.

According to the study, 8- to 18-year-olds listen to music for an average of 16 hours per week.