The authors of a small study that has not yet been peer reviewed in scientific journals argue that rap fans may be prone to dissociative personality disorder, while pop music lovers probably do not.
Psychopath is not exactly a scientific word; in the ICD-10 list, what is meant by psychopathy in movies is called specific personality disorder F60.2 (dissocial personality disorder, DRL); it is characterized by callousness and aggression, problems with the observance of social norms. The question of how to treat people with such a disorder belongs to the field of ethics and is still not fully resolved; on the one hand, they can control their actions and get along with other people. On the other hand, their actions are often unpredictable, and few people want people with a tendency to dissocial disorder to occupy high positions or acquire political capital.
Therefore, psychologists from the University of New York are looking for a way to identify carriers of this disorder - moreover, not any, but one that can be used without the knowledge of the subject. Today they told the media about their first results, which have not yet been published either in scientific journals or as a preprint. Scientists gave 200 subjects to listen to 260 songs and rate each according to personal preference. Then, all study participants underwent standard tests to identify dissociative personality disorder. Two songs by famous rappers, Eminem and Blackstreet (Lose Yourself and No Diggity, respectively) proved to be especially popular among so-called "psychopaths".
In the second experiment, the scientists went the other way: they tested how reliable the determination of the propensity for DRL is based on their favorite compositions. Fans of pop artists The Knack and Sia were consistently less prone to dissociative disorder.
The authors of the study plan to scale up and involve thousands of people in the experiment; Based on large statistics, psychologists hope to make the musical preference test a reliable indicator of mental health. However, scientists make an important reservation: I only work with their patterns when a person has clear musical preferences.