Experiment Links Perceiving Emotions in Music and People

"If music evolved to help us navigate our social environment, and music is first and foremost a social behavior, then we would expect there'd be some sort of shared neural processes underlying both," Zachary Wallmark says.18percentgrey/Shutterstock

People who can skillfully interpret other people’s emotional states may also be better at assessing the emotions conveyed by music, new research shows.

Humans have been making music throughout recorded history, “but it doesn’t seem to serve any obvious biological function,” says University of Oregon musicologist and cognitive scientist Zachary Wallmark.

The new research lends support to one explanation for the evolutionary origins of music: that it facilitates social connection, much like empathy does.

Wallmark co-led the study alongside psychologist Benjamin Tabak at Southern Methodist University. They report their findings in the journal Emotion.

Rather than ask people to assess their own empathy, Wallmark and Tabak looked at a more objective measure: people’s skill in interpreting others’ feelings.

They showed participants videos of people talking about emotional events in their lives and also played clips of piano music that were specifically composed to convey an emotional narrative. They asked participants to identify the emotions being shared, tracking positive and negative effects throughout each clip.

Participants’ responses were then compared to the videotaped people’s and musicians’ own responses. People who were better at tracking the emotions in the videos were also more accurate at assessing the emotions conveyed by the music.

“If music evolved to help us navigate our social environment, and music is first and foremost a social behavior, then we would expect there’d be some sort of shared neural processes underlying both,” Wallmark says.

The study suggests there may be a link. Now, in research sponsored by the Grammy Foundation, he and his team are looking at the brain to see if similar neural circuits are involved. The research could translate into therapeutic and social skills training for people with social-cognitive impairments.

This article was originally published by the University of Oregon. Republished via Futurity.org