The impact of music on metaphor production

Metaphors are a creative use of language that conveys complex ideas through abstract reasoning and cognitive flexibility. While prior research has demonstrated that music influences creativity, its specific impact on metaphor production remains unexplored. In this study, 90 adults were assigned to one of three groups—silence, happy music, sad music—and completed a metaphor production task, generating expressions for emotions (e.g., being happy) and actions (e.g., telling a lie). Participants also completed convergent and divergent thinking assessments to account for individual differences in creativity. Results showed that participants who listened to happy music were more likely to produce figurative expressions, with convergent creativity positively predicting their production, while divergent creativity had no effect. Moreover, metaphors produced with background music were generally rated as more novel than those produced in silence, with sad music leading to metaphors with a more negative emotional tone. These findings suggest that extrinsic factors, particularly happy music, can enhance our ability to produce metaphors by boosting cognitive flexibility and persistence required for creative thinking.