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Listening to songs like 50 Cent's In Da Club will 'make you feel more powerful in life'

Study claims that listening to high-powered songs could change your behaviour and make you more determined

Natasha Culzac
Friday 08 August 2014 18:22 BST
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Listening to bass-heavy music like 50 Cent's In Da Club will "change your mindset"
Listening to bass-heavy music like 50 Cent's In Da Club will "change your mindset" (Getty)

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Listen to bass-heavy tunes such as 50 Cent’s In Da Club or Queen’s We Will Rock You – they’ll help you succeed in life, researchers have said.

A study by The Society For Personality And Social Psychology asked a group of people to rate 31 songs on how strong and determined they made them feel.

The aforementioned two songs, as well as 2 Unlimited’s Get Ready for This were placed in the higher end of that category, in contrast to those that gave a lesser effect.

Two new groups listened to a category each and were then asked to complete a series of words.

For example, if shown P_ _ER, they could complete it as ‘power’ or ‘paper’, according to Kellogg Insight.

The ones who listened to the high-powered playlist were more likely to complete the words with strength and dominance in mind, compared with the low-powered playlist group.

It led researchers to believe that bass-heavy music could have an effect on behaviour and make its listener feel more powerful.

The low-powered songs were: Fatboy Slim’s Because We Can; Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out; and Notorious BIG’s Big Poppa.

As reported by NME, Derek Rucker, the report’s co-author, told Kellogg Insight: “Just as professional athletes might put on empowering music before they take the field to get them in a powerful state of mind. You might try [this] in certain situations where you want to be empowered.”

The paper, he Music of Power: Perceptual and Behavioral Consequences of Powerful Music, was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science on 5 August.

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