It’s a fact: happy music makes for better employees

NEXT time your boss scolds you for wearing headphones at your desk, tell them Cornell scientists approve.

Listening to happy songs, such as The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Katrina And The Waves’ Walking On Sunshine makes for better employees, a new study has found. Researchers at Cornell University studied how music influences workers’ behaviour. They recruited 188 participants – 75 women and 113 men – and divided them into three groups.

One group listened to a playlist of four happy songs, which also included Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl and the theme songs from Happy Days, and lasted a total of 12 minutes.

Another group listened to eight minutes of heavy metal songs, such as Smokahontas by Ohio band Attack Attack! and You Ain’t No Family by Louisiana’s Iwrestledabearonce.

And the third group, acting as a control group, didn’t listen to any music at all.

All participants played a game in teams of three, during which they received tokens with an assigned monetary value.

Participants who played the game while listening to happy music were more likely to give their token and contribute to the group’s value than those listening to metal music or to no music at all, the researchers found.

Retailers should now consider how playing music could improve their employees’ performance. – Daily Mail