Abstract
The social cognitive basis of music processing has long been noted, and recent research has shown that trait empathy is linked to musical preferences and listening style. Does empathy modulate neural responses to musical sounds? We designed two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to address this question. In Experiment 1, subjects listened to brief isolated musical timbres while being scanned. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to excerpts of music in four conditions (familiar liked (FL)/disliked and unfamiliar liked (UL)/disliked). For both types of musical stimuli, emotional and cognitive forms of trait empathy modulated activity in sensorimotor and cognitive areas: in the first experiment, empathy was primarily correlated with activity in supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and insula; in Experiment 2, empathy was mainly correlated with activity in prefrontal, temporo-parietal and reward areas. Taken together, these findings reveal the interactions between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of empathy in response to musical sounds, in line with recent findings from other cognitive domains.
Highlights
Music is a portal into the interior lives of others
We evaluated the effect of trait empathy on the processing of musical timbre in three basic conditions: (1) task > baseline; (2) positively valenced > negatively valenced timbres; and (3) noisy > normal timbres
With trait empathy scores added as covariates to our model, we found that neural responses to the valence of timbre are differentiated by Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) subscale
Summary
By disclosing the affective and cognitive states of actual or imagined human actors, musical engagement can function as a mediated form of social encounter, even when listening by ourselves. Listening to music can be seen as a socializing activity in the sense that it may train the listener’s self in social attuning and empathic relationships.’’ In short, musical experience and empathy are psychological neighbors. The concept of empathy has generated sustained interest in recent years among researchers seeking to better account for the social and affective valence of musical experience (for recent reviews see Clarke et al, 2015; Miu and Vuoskoski, 2017); it is a popular topic of research in social neuroscience (Decety and Ickes, 2009; Coplan and Goldie, 2011). Individual differences in trait empathy modulate how we process social stimuli—does empathy modulate music processing as well? If we consider music through
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