One thing the film industry get right - and they don't get much right, since romantic comedy behavior in real life is likely to get you a restraining order - is that music evokes moods.

French researchers (naturally) say they have determined that if you want to successfully ask a woman on a date, the right soundtrack could improve the odds. They found women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music.

No question media affect our behavior and the only people who disagree with the science behind that are involved in the criticized medium - violent games don't beget violence if you play them, same with cigarette advertising, etc. - and the strangest syncopation, to either brilliant or annoying effect, is when a filmmaker pairs up a scene of one kind with music of another, or intentionally over-dramatizes the score to enhance a silly premise.   See "Team America: World Police":



Everyone studies the effect of violent media but researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud along with Lubomir Lamy from Université de Paris-Sud, wanted to find out if romantic songs had similar power - so they tested them on the most unrealistically romantic group in the world;  18-20 year old Western European single females. And it turns out that at least one romantic love song did make a difference.  That's good news for your next trip to Paris, since 75% of the music they listen to is American and it would be 100% if their federal government did not mandate 25% French language content.

Guéguen and Jacob were part of a research team that had already shown how romantic music played in a flower shop led to male customers spending more money. This time they used questionnaires to pinpoint agreed-upon neutral and romantic songs. They chose ‘Je l’aime à mourir’, a well-known love song by French songwriter Francis Cabrel, and a neutral song ‘L’heure du thé’, by Vincent Delerm. A group of young women separate from the main study rated 12 young male volunteers for attractiveness, and the researchers picked the one rated closest to ‘average’ to help with the experiment.

The researchers then set up a scenario where the 87 females each spent time in a waiting room with background music playing, before moving to a different room where the experimenter instructed her to discuss the difference between two food products with the young man. Once the experimenter returned, she asked them to wait for a few moments alone, and this gave the ‘average’ male a chance to use his standard chat up line; "My name is Antoine, as you know, I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number.  I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together somewhere next week."

The love song in the waiting room almost doubled Antoine’s chances of getting a woman’s number – 52% of participants responded to his advances under the influence of Francis Cabrel, whereas only 28% of those who had heard the neutral song by Vincent Delerm offered their details.

"Our results confirm that the effect of exposure to media content is not limited to violence and could have the potential to influence a high spectrum of behaviour," says Guéguen. "The results are interesting for scientists who work on the effect of background music on individuals’ behaviour."

They say the results also add weight to a general learning model proposed by Buckley and Anderson in 2006 to explain the effect of media exposure, which states that media exposure in general, and not only aggressive or violent media, affects individuals’ internal states and explains why pro-social media fosters pro-social outcomes.

But why did the music have this effect?

It may be that the music induced positive affect.  In psychological terms, affect is the experience of feeling or emotion.   Positive affect is associated with being more receptive to courtship requests.

Alternatively, the romantic content of the song may have acted as a prime that then led to displays of behavior associated with that prime - for example, women may have watched romantic comedies wherein successful date requests had a romantic score underlaying the visuals.

In either case, further research is needed before the researchers will commit to wider generalizations on the targeted use of love songs.   We are under no such restrictions so if you're a hopeful single,  stick your prospective date in a waiting room and control the audio.  What's the worst that can happen?