New research suggests that a person's music habits can reveal a lot about their mental health.

Researchers from the Academy of Finland found that men who process negative feelings with music react negatively to aggressive and sad music. This is important since emotion regulation is an essential component to mental health.

Poor emotion regulation is associated with psychiatric mood disorders such as depression. Clinical music therapists know the power music can have over emotions, and are able to use music to help their clients to better mood states and even to help relieve symptoms of psychiatric mood disorders like depression.

"Some ways of coping with negative emotion, such as rumination, which means continually thinking over negative things, are linked to poor mental health. We wanted to learn whether there could be similar negative effects of some styles of music listening," Emily Carlson, a music therapist and the main author of the study, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers looked at combination of behavioral and neuroimaging data to examine the relationship between mental health, music listening habits and neural responses to music emotions. Brain imaging reveals how neural responses to different types of music really affect the emotion regulation of persons.

They found that anxiety and neuroticism were higher in participants who tended to listen to sad or aggressive music to express negative feelings, particularly in males.

"This style of listening results in the feeling of expression of negative feelings, not necessarily improving the negative mood," Dr. Suvi Saarikallio, co-author of the study, said in a statement.

The findings are detailed in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.