India, Sept. 29 -- It's 2 am, you're spiraling over your ex's latest Instagram story, and, somehow, you've found yourself three hours deep into a Taylor Swift breakup song playlist. Your friends keep telling you to listen to something uplifting. But you don't want to because, paradoxically, listening to Taylor's depressing bops is actually making you feel better! So why does listening to sad music make you feel better and not worse? And why do you enjoy listening to the breakup song when you don't enjoy the sadness of your own breakup?

My research collaborators at Yale University and I tried to figure out why we like sad art when we hate experiencing sadness in real life. We pay good money to see depressing movies and listen to Sad Girl ...