Shared empathic process in music and social contexts: exploring empathic accuracy and physiological responses across modalities and valence

Abstract

Empathy is a crucial element in human societies, playing a central role in interpersonal communication and fostering social bonds. Recent studies have explored shared emotional experiences in music performance by analyzing physiological synchrony, but there is a gap in research directly examining the continuous empathic process and its relationship between music and social situations. This study aims to investigate empathic processes in music and social situations by examining empathic accuracy and heart rate synchrony across different modalities (visual-only/audio-only/video-and-audio) and valence (positive/negative). Results from a multilevel correlation analysis indicate a positive association between empathic accuracy for music and social situations, particularly when only visual information is presented. Repeated measures ANOVA also reveals that empathic accuracy in social situations is significantly higher than in music situations, and in both contexts, auditory information is associated with higher empathic accuracy than visual information alone. The study identifies shared empathy processing mechanisms between music and social contexts, suggesting potential transfer effects of music education on improving social interaction abilities.