If you’ve ever listened to an emotional breakup song or wept at the tragic end of a Hollywood film, you might have wondered why something so sad felt so enjoyable and compelling.

A few years ago, George Newman, an associate professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, became interested in the topic of sadness in art. “We tend to go towards what feels good, and we avoid what feels bad,” Newman says. “But we seem to be drawn to sadness in art, which produces negative emotions. Why is that? There was a bit of a mystery there.”

Newman teamed with a few colleagues — Tara Venkatesan (an opera singer and researcher at Universal Music Group), and Mario Attie-Picker and Joshua Knobe (philosophers at Yale University) — to better understand why humans are drawn towards sadness, specifically when it’s presented as art, like music, films and poetry.

“A lot of people consume sad art, like sad songs or sad literature, but people don’t often seek out sad conversations with people in the real world,” Newman says.

The researchers found that sad art serves a different purpose from sadness in real life. “People actively seek out and see artwork as an opportunity to give voice to what they're feeling,” Newman says. “Even though those events might not have literally happened to me, I can still map my experience onto them.” Newman describes this experience of mapping our feelings onto art as “appropriation,” and it’s something that doesn’t happen when we hear about real-life sadness that’s not in art form, like a friend talking to you about the death of a family member. “If you were to just tell me your sad story, because it's not framed as art, I don't have the same license to make it my own,” Newman explains. “In fact, it would be kind of weird if I did.”

To study this phenomenon, the researchers presented study participants with the same version of text in multiple contexts: for example, an artistic monologue versus a real-life diary entry or song lyrics versus a tweet. Participants were asked to rate the art, writing, tweet, etc., on a scale of one to seven in terms of how much they enjoyed the experience of reading it. They found that the same words were liked more by study participants as art (the monologue and song lyrics), compared to when the same text appeared as a diary entry or a tweet.

While the study only focused on sadness, Newman believes the findings extend to other emotions, too. “If an artist does something that's very happy or very angry, the idea would be that you're giving the audience an opportunity to appropriate — to make the emotion their own and give voice to whatever they're feeling,” he says.

A surprising outcome of their research was that people liked sad art even more when they found out it was based on real life. “I think there’s some aspect of authenticity there,” Newman says. He’s careful to explain that the authors didn’t investigate authenticity in their paper, but he speculates that sad art based on real life makes the emotions feel “even more salient.”

Take the example of Taylor Swift, who’s known for her narrative songwriting and break-up songs based on real-life romances. “She's able to write songs that are very real to her, but because they're songs, they open that door for her fans to make them about their own lives and emotions,” Newman says. “You can imagine somebody listening to her song and the breakup story during her concert, versus imagining if they were backstage with Taylor afterwards and she recounted the same bad story to them. They might be very sympathetic and give her lots of hugs, but it’s not going to be the cathartic, moving experience for the fan that it would be if they were listening to that song in the audience.”

The findings encourage storytellers, whether a playwright creating a play or a factual podcast, to merge art with real life. This could make their material more compelling and appealing to audiences. He points to the example of the narrative journalism podcast This American Life. “Some episodes are very factual, but they have an artistic quality to them that allows for appropriation from listeners,” Newman says. Conversely, a playwright or singer-songwriter could openly share that their work of art is based on a true story. “When it feels more authentic, it could be that you get sucked into the story more.”

When it comes to workplaces, Newman hopes that business leaders remember the human desire to feel and express emotions. “There’s an understanding of how deep our need is to connect and to feel like others are sharing the same experiences and emotional lives as us,” he says. Organizations should recognize the importance of art and how powerfully it can connect people by offering opportunities for teams to consume art together. Visiting an art gallery or going to a play that tackles a certain theme or emotion could help their employees think more about their own lives, and it could be an enjoyable team activity, too. 

“Something that we spend a lot of our time on this planet doing is consuming things that give voice to our own experiences,” he says. “There is a bit more understanding about ourselves, what makes us tick and how we get through life.”

Want more workplace psychology insights? Subscribe to the Rotman Insights Hub to get the latest management research delivered straight to your inbox every other week.