Music Preferences Linked to Personality: Study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The music you listen to may say more about you than you think, according to new research findings that suggest that our choice in music reflects our personalities.

Do you enjoy blues, jazz, classical and folk music? You may be intelligent, tolerant and politically liberal, researchers report.

Meanwhile, country and religious music fans tend to be cheerful, outgoing, reliable and conventional, while alternative and heavy metal music lovers tend to be physically active, curious risk-takers.

I wonder what that says about those of us with all-encompassing eclectic tastes. I enjoy jazz and classical (as you might expect, given that I spent 6 years getting degrees in classical guitar performance). But I also enjoy country music, bluegrass, Christian music (at least some of it), and modern rock. I would have a much easier time coming up with the very few genres and periods of music that I don't like than the ones that I do. (Dislikes: just about anything from the 1970s; most rap; 20th-century serial music. I'm also not too crazy about early Baroque opera.)