Do you love folk music? It may be due to your empathetic nature. A new study in PLOS One shows there is a relationship between musical preferences and personality, as well as how we think.

(That is clearly the most journalistic lead I’ve ever written on this blog. Absurd! Who do I think I am.)

Recent reports on the study have appeared in The Atlantic, the BBC, and on NPR.

Says The Atlantic:

[Study author] Greenberg found that people who scored high on empathy tended to prefer music that was mellow (like soft rock and R&B), unpretentious (country and folk), and contemporary (Euro pop and electronica.) What they didn’t like, meanwhile, was “intense” music, which he classified as things like punk and heavy metal. People who scored high on systemizing, meanwhile, had just the opposite preferences—they kick back to Slayer and could do without Courtney Barnett.

To get even more specific, the music empathizers liked tended to be softer, more depressing, and have more emotional depth. Systemizers, meanwhile, grooved to things that were high-energy, animated, and complex. Empathizers liked strings; systemizers liked distorted, loud, and “percussive.”

Loving both mellow and intense music apparently indicates my empathetic systemizing nature. I straddle the line, which I already knew. But what I’m curious to know is if at any given moment musical preference can indicate current capacity for empathy. For example, if I’m listening to Skinny Puppy would I be less inclined to listen to someone’s troubles than if I were listening to Nick Drake?