Initial evidence for a relation between behaviorally assessed empathic accuracy and affect sharing for people and music.

Are people who are better able to understand or feel the emotions of others also better at understanding or feeling emotions conveyed through music? Although evolutionary theories have proposed that both empathy and music help to foster social connection, few studies to date have examined the relation between behavioral assessments of empathic processes for people and music. We examined this question using 2 independent samples: a laboratory sample of undergraduates (n = 236) and a larger online direct replication with participants across the United States (n = 596). Across both samples, linear mixed effects models showed positive associations between empathic accuracy and affect sharing for people telling personal stories and for musical expression, and results were maintained when including relevant individual differences as covariates. These findings provide initial evidence of a relation between behaviorally assessed empathic processes across social and musical domains. Future research is needed to build upon this evidence by investigating whether active, socially engaged music listening may have a beneficial effect on social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Revisiting the association between self-reported empathy and behavioral assessments of social cognition.

Previous research has shown a weak association between self-reported empathy and performance on behavioral assessments of social cognition. However, previous studies have often overlooked important distinctions within these multifaceted constructs (e.g., differences among the subcomponents of self-reported empathy, distinctions in tasks assessing lower- vs. high-level social cognition, and potential covariates that represent competing predictors). Using data from three separate studies (total N = 2,376), we tested whether the tendency to take the perspective of others (i.e., perspective-taking), and the tendency to catch the emotions of others (i.e., emotional contagion for positive and negative emotions), were associated with performance on tasks assessing lower- to higher-level social-cognitive ability (i.e., emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathic accuracy) and affect sharing. Results showed little evidence of an association between any of the self-reported empathy measures and either social-cognitive ability or affect sharing. Using several large samples, our findings add additional evidence to previous work showing that self-report measures of empathy are not valid proxies of behaviorally assessed social cognition. Moreover, we find that the ease with which individuals recognize and understand their own emotions (i.e., alexithymia) is more related to social-cognitive abilities and affect sharing, than their tendency to take the perspective of others, or to vicariously experience the emotions of others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Preschoolers' crossmodal mappings of timbre.

Crossmodal correspondences have been of interest to researchers for nearly a century, although it is only more recently that interactions related to timbre have been examined systematically. Timbre is often described using crossmodal adjectives (e.g., bright, smooth). However, it is not clear whether these semantic conventions are primarily the result of low-level multisensory interactions or are more a product of associative learning and musical training. Do young children exhibit crossmodal correspondences involving timbre? The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of timbre, age, and sensory modality (visual and tactile) on the consistency and congruency of young children's patterns of crossmodal mappings. Preschool children (N = 69, M age = 4.51) completed a novel audio-visual and audio-tactile association task. Results indicate that children are moderately consistent in their associations; mappings are largely congruent with adult associations; and results suggest a possible developmental time course for the establishment of crossmodal correspondences between approximately ages 3 and 6. However, congruency is dependent on modality, with robust agreement in the tactile-auditory domain but a good deal more variance and a stronger developmental influence on visual-auditory associations. These results are the first to demonstrate that crossmodal correspondences are a feature of timbre perception early in development.

Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening.

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.