You are what you listen to : finding correlations between tastes in music and personality traits among university students : a quantitative study

Abstract

Plenty of research within music psychology has investigated the function and effect music has on us as individuals, be it evolutionary, cognitive or biological. However, little research has been dedicated towards investigating why we endorse the music genres that we do. In the last decade, an increase in research exploring the link between music and preference emerged, yet none of this research attested to a Maltese context. With music therapy still being a relatively unexplored area in Malta, it was logical to investigate how therapists within a Maltese context could gain a better understanding of their patients’ personalities through knowing what music they listen to. This quantitative research was performed among University of Malta aged 18-25 (n=429) using two questionnaires: The Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) to measure the Big-Five personality traits and the Revised Version of the Short Test Of Music Preference (STOMP-R) to measure music preference. The results of the research show that some significant correlations do exist within a Maltese population between music preference and personality traits. Some gender differences in tastes in music were also observed. The present study detected that the reliability for the STOMP-R test within a Maltese context is not completely reliable, albeit acceptable.