SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
In Teen Music Choices, Anxiety Rules
from Scientific American
In 2009, Miley Cyrus reportedly made an astonishing 25 million dollars. Most of that money came from album sales, which were reported to be slightly over 4 million during that year. ... According to the findings of a study recently published in Neuroimage, selling four million albums does not translate to having four million people like your music.
The study reports that there is good reason to believe that a lot of those purchases were made out of fear--a fear well known to adolescents all over America: terror of social rejection. The fear of social rejection is so strong in adolescents because their relationships are essential for passing on the lessons that will enable them to join adult society....
Gregory S. Berns, the chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University, and his colleagues set out to understand more about the neural and behavioral mechanics of social influence on decisions about purchasing music. The researchers' basic question was: When people change their behavior based on social influence, is it their actual preferences that change, or simply their behavior? In order to investigate this question they designed a clever behavioral study that was amenable to being performed while participants had their brains scanned.
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