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Listening to sad music lifts people out of depression. New research reveals that listening to tearjerkers can actually boost our emotional wellbeing by triggering feelings of peace and nostalgia.

Researchers found that that most people feel more than three emotions when listening to sentimental music.

Lead researchers Liila Taruffi and Stefan Koelsch, of the Free University of Berlin, analyzed data from 722 people worldwide and found that sad music actually benefits mental health.

"For many individuals, listening to sad music can actually lead to beneficial emotional effects," researchers wrote in their study.

"Music-evoked sadness can be appreciated not only as an aesthetic, abstract reward, but [it] also plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions," they added, according to the Daily Mail.

"Results show four different rewards of music-evoked sadness: reward of imagination, emotion regulation, empathy, and no 'real-life' implications," researchers wrote in the study.

"The average number of emotions that participants reported to have experienced in response to sad music was above three," they added. "This suggests that a multifaceted emotional experience elicited by sad music enhances its aesthetic appeal."

"For most of the people, the engagement with sad music in everyday life is correlated with its potential to regulate negative moods and emotions, as well as to provide consolation," the researchers concluded. "Appreciation of sad music follows a mood-congruent fashion and is greater among individuals with high empathy and low emotional stability."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.