Abstract
Individuals with a predisposition to empathize engage with sad music in a compelling way, experiencing overall more pleasurable emotions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying these music-related experiences in empathic individuals are unknown. The present study tested whether dispositional empathy modulates neural responses to sad compared with happy music. Twenty-four participants underwent fMRI while listening to 4-min blocks of music evoking sadness or happiness. Using voxel-wise regression, we found a positive correlation between trait empathy (with scores assessed by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index) and eigenvector centrality values in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), including the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). We then performed a functional connectivity (FC) analysis to detect network nodes showing stronger FC with the vmPFC/mOFC during the presentation of sad versus happy music. By doing so, we identified a “music-empathy” network (vmPFC/mOFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, primary visual cortex, bilateral claustrum and putamen, and cerebellum) that is spontaneously recruited while listening to sad music and includes brain regions that support the coding of compassion, mentalizing, and visual mental imagery. Importantly, our findings extend the current understanding of empathic behaviors to the musical domain and pinpoint sad music as an effective stimulus to be employed in social neuroscience research.
Highlights
Empathy is one of the most remarkable human abilities that allows, for instance, to understand what it feels like to experience someone else’s joy or sadness and that promotes meaningful social interaction
Significant positive correlations between Eigenvector Centrality (EC) and the total empathy scores were observed in a cluster of voxels located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), including the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) (Fig. 1; Table 1), suggesting that the vmPFC is more crucial to emotional processes in people with high empathy scores
No region was found to show significantly stronger functional connectivity with the vmPFC/mOFC during happy compared with sad music
Summary
Empathy is one of the most remarkable human abilities that allows, for instance, to understand what it feels like to experience someone else’s joy or sadness and that promotes meaningful social interaction. Empathic behaviors are diverse and include resonating affectively with others’ emotions (affective empathy or experience sharing) and comprehending others’ mental and affective states (cognitive empathy or mentalizing) (Zaki & Ochsner, 2012). While sharing another person’s positive emotion is doubtlessly pleasant, shared negative affective experiences can be challenging and may lead to empathic distress, a maladaptive empathic response that is associated with burnout in individuals who are Bergen, Bergen, Norway 3 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité – Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany routinely exposed to the suffering of others, such as physicians, nurses, and therapists (McCray et al, 2008). With regard to cognitive empathy, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), the superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction, the posterior
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