Original title: Psychological Effects of Cultural Upheavals from Millions of Song Lyrics Over 100 Years
David M. Markowitz · September 2026
Major cultural upheavals shake society, but researchers rarely measure how they change individual people at scale in popular media. To explore this, researchers analyzed millions of song lyrics written over more than a century. They searched for signs of psychological distress before and after three major events: the Vietnam War, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and COVID-19. They discovered that artists actively changed their words during these crises. Compared to a five-year baseline, self-referencesWords like 'I', 'me', 'my' that point to the person speaking or writing. dropped after the Vietnam War and September 11th, showing that musicians distanced themselves emotionally. Across the disruptions, artists used more cognitive processing words to make meaning of events. They also focused more on societal themes like "life and freedom" and less on "courtship and nightlife."
Imagine you keep a journal. On normal days, you write about your plans and feelings—lots of 'I' and 'me'. After a major community crisis, you might write more about what happened and try to understand it—more 'we', 'why', 'because'. In this paper, song lyrics from across a century are treated like those journal entries. The researchers counted such word shifts to see how artists collectively responded to upheavals like war and terrorism.
This matters because it reveals that even popular art reflects how people psychologically process collective trauma. Understanding these shifts in song lyrics can help researchers and the public see the hidden effects of crises on a population's mindset, and it confirms that cultural upheavals leave measurable traces in everyday language.
The abstract doesn't explicitly state limitations, but it notes that few studies have isolated such impacts, and the analysis is focused on three upheavals, specific linguistic markers, and a five-year baseline. This means it may not capture other crises, broader psychological responses, or long-term trends.
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Psychological Effects of Cultural Upheavals from Millions of Song Lyrics Over 100 Years — David M. Markowitz
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.