Researchers from three top schools of business around the world examined the ritual of listening to music for empowerment, shedding new light on how it works, psychologically speaking, and which tunes are best for the job.

Yes, certain songs are better at provoking that feeling of omnipotence than others, and the research team, led by Dennis Hsu, of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, says it's a question of bass level.

Researchers, who also came from Columbia University and INSEAD, began by pre-testing 30-second clips of 31 soundtracks from a variety of contemporary genres including hip-hop and reggae to assess participants' reactions. This pre-testing phase involved 75 undergraduate participants.

Participants reported feeling the most powerful after listening to clips of Queen's "We Will Rock You" and 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready for This," whereas Fatboy Slim's "Because We Can" and Baha Men's "Who Let the Dogs Out" provoked minimal reactions.

A series of experiments followed in which researchers probed participants to learn exactly how the soundtracks in question led to feelings of power.

They targeted three conventional psychological and behavioral consequences of power, which include the desire to make the first move in competitive interactions, a perception of social control that edges on illusion, and thought abstraction.

Most of the 75 undergraduates participated in these experiments, but only 39 participants were involved in the abstraction experiment.

Examples of how they tested for each dimension of power include a decision-making scenario to measure one's need to make the first move, a die-rolling task to measure illusions of control and a categorization task to measure thought abstraction.

Their results indicate that the best performing soundtracks provoked feelings of omnipotence subconsciously and that they systematically called upon all three dimensions of power.

Inspired by previous research associating with bass sounds with power in the human voice, the team conducted separate experiments to explore the effect of bass, the structural component of several soundtracks involved.

After listening to novel instrumental music with digitally varied bass levels, participants reported that heavy-bass music evoked greater feelings of power than did low-bass pieces.

In another bass experiment, participants were given a word-completion task intended to screen for unconscious feelings of power.

Again, the heavy-bass music emerged as the top power-provoker.

Researchers say the results of the bass experiments heed evidence to the "contagion hypothesis," which is based on the idea that people mimic internally what they hear in their environment.

After further experimentation, involving 36 participants, the team ruled out lyrics as a power-provoking aspect.

Hsu says he and his colleagues conceived the study upon observing athletes wearing headphones while preparing for major sporting competitions.

"The ways these athletes immerse themselves in the music -- some with their eyes steely shut and some gently nodded along the beats -- seem as if the music is mentally preparing and toughening them up for the competition about to occur," says Hsu.

The study was published in the journal Social, Psychological and Personality Science.