quote:
The most gifted teenagers often love heavy metal music because it relieves the pressure of being smart, says a British psychologist who has boosted the images of bright kids and metalheads together.Stuart Cadwallader is getting thanks from all directions after his cliche-shattering data, announced this week at a psychology conference in England.
The gifted students are relieved not to be seen as clarinet-toting Mozart-lovers. The metalheads are pleased that someone, for a change, isn't calling them all losers.
And the heavy-on-guitar and big-on-drum anthems are getting some respect in the academic community.
Cadwallader is happy, too. He's a PhD student at the University of Warwick. "This was my master's project. I was expecting it to be read by about three people," he said in an interview.
How wrong he was. His findings that about one-third of gifted teenagers enjoy heavy metal perked up a conference that otherwise had topics along the lines of: "Toward a meta-methodology of qualitative research."
A few years back, the psychology student was reading an article about how music tastes relate to a person's identity. His university is home to the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, for students ranked in the top five per cent academically.
Cadwallader surveyed 1,057 boys and girls aged 11 to 18 there, asking about their emotions, families, interests and musical tastes. The results: Six per cent of the gifted kids chose heavy metal as their favourite music.
And a full third of them rated it among their top several styles, along with the universally popular rock and pop.
"I ended up studying heavy metal because I think it's so incongruous with the stereotype of gifted youth listening to classical music, spending all their time reading," he said. "Quite a fun stereotype to dispel a little bit."
There's a tradition of viewing Iron Maiden and Metallica fans as delinquents who do badly in school, and this turns out to be untrue, he adds.
"Heavy metal can be scary for adults, or for people who don't appreciate it . . . It can sound very aggressive."
But this music actually relaxes many of the study's teenagers. It releases anger and frustration -- feelings that many blamed on the pressures and expectations that come from being labelled as gifted.
"They spoke specifically about using heavy metal for catharsis, literally using the loud and often aggressive music to 'jump out' frustrations and anger," Cadwallader writes in a summary of the results.
And the survey's findings on classical music?
"It was the least popular genre," he said.
posted March 24, 2007 11:05
posted March 24, 2007 12:33
posted March 24, 2007 17:10
posted March 24, 2007 17:44
