King Charles III is sharing a personal playlist of music for Commonwealth Day, and the widely reported collection includes legendary artists Bob Marley, Kylie Minogue, and Grace Jones, alongside more contemporary talent such as Davido and Raye.

Given there is much psychological research that links personality type to musical preferences, has the King inadvertently divulged more about his personality than he may have realised? Perhaps part of his core self that he would prefer to remain private?

This extent of the King’s personal choice of music had never been revealed before, hence the global media attention. But did the press miss a trick in not grasping that, according to much psychological research, our music choices can reveal an awful lot about our character?

Does music play an emotional role in our lives?

The King certainly has a grasp of what behavioural scientists believe is the role that music plays in our lives from a psychological standpoint, which is that it regulates our mood, perhaps more than any other activity.

Maybe, at times, music is better than therapy.

The King declared that listening to music lifts his spirits and brings back important memories: “It brings us joy.” But this raises the immediate question of whether such need for joy suggests he requires cheering up quite a lot.

Has the playlist revealed that he can get quite low at times? Popular music is known as the “poor man’s psychotherapy.” Has the King inadvertently exposed something deeper about his fiercely privately guarded life than previously realised?

The full choice of tracks, with more royal commentary, will be published on Monday for Commonwealth Day.

Is there a link between personality and music preference?

Results from the recent study, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues: Personality and the Interplay Between Emotion and Genre,” corroborated previous research, demonstrating a positive association between extraverts and preferences for high-arousal music genres such as hip-hop and rap. The personality feature of openness to experience was linked with jazz. Neuroticism was associated with calming compositions.

The Big Five Personality Traits refers to dimensions along which we can all score high or low. The five traits include:

Openness, the tendency to be creative and open-minded
Conscientiousness, the tendency to be organized and efficient
Extraversion, the tendency to be energetic and outgoing
Agreeableness, the tendency to be friendly and kind
Neuroticism, the tendency to experience negative feelings

The authors of the study report that openness has been consistently correlated with a preference for music with high levels of complexity, such as jazz and classical. Extraversion relates more to the preference for energetic genres such as dance and hip-hop. But some the researchers in the field argue that the relationship between individual differences and music preferences may be more complex, not least because our choice of music may reveal more about our specific emotional needs at particular moments in time, and it will be different at contrasting moments in our lives.

Previous research has established that preferences for pop, rap or hip-hop, soul or funk, and electronica or dance music are positively associated with needs to increase emotional arousal. Preference for soul or funk music was positively associated with using music for up-regulating positive emotionality and down-regulating negative emotionality. Maybe some genres, by their very nature, are known to embody certain emotional characteristics; for example, electronica or dance music being largely linked with high arousal. Maybe that is precisely why we gravitate towards them, even before we have heard any particular track.

Other research has found that jazz and classical music are linked to emotions such as longing, amazement, spirituality, and peacefulness. Techno and Latin American music elicited disinhibited, excited, active, agitated, energetic, and fiery emotions, while pop or rock music was found to evoke emotions such as aggression, anger, rage, irritation, and revolt.

Openness has been linked with a preference for a broader variety of music and is also positively correlated with moods including sombre and melancholy; conscientiousness with lively and empowering moods, and agreeableness with moods including romantic and easy-going, extraversion with sensual and cool moods, and neuroticism positively correlated with brooding, defiant and sombre moods.

Other research has found links between openness and genres, including folk, jazz, and blues, and included correlations between extraversion and rhythm and blues and rap, agreeableness and country, and neuroticism and alternative music.

Do people use music to understand the character of others?

Maybe the King was fully aware that his playlist would be prone to interpretation because, even if he isn’t a trained psychologist, he is drawing on his layperson’s intuition, and academic studies confirm that we all have instincts that we can read people through their musical preferences.

For example, online dating websites and apps ask about music preferences. Past research has found that individuals consider their music preferences more revealing of their personalities than their preferences for books, clothing, food, movies, and even television shows.

A study, ‘Message in a Ballad: The Role of Music Preferences in Interpersonal Perception,’ found that music preferences provide more information than practically any other personal data about a person’s agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness but less information about a person’s extraversion and conscientiousness.

The study revealed that music was the most common topic in conversations among strangers given the task of getting acquainted, and observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions based on a person’s music preferences.

One study of the practices surrounding online music sharing suggests that at work, individuals’ impressions of their colleagues are swayed by their colleagues’ tune collections. Although most of the participants in this study already worked together, information about their co-workers’ music preferences enabled them to develop more nuanced impressions about personality characteristics that were not easily derived from other interactions at work.

Although we may feel we have already formed a strong impression of the kind of character the King is, research suggests that if we listen carefully to his musical preferences, revealed in more detail now than ever before, we may be able to develop an even deeper understanding of who he is.

Given how much he has emphasised the role that melody plays in his life in lifting his spirits, it would appear that although music is referred to as the ‘poor man’s psychotherapy,’ if even a King turns to melodies for reasons linked to emotional needs, maybe we should all pay more attention to the positive emotional power of music.