The social side of music listening : Empathy and contagion in music-induced emotions

Process theories have identified empathy and contagion as mechanisms by which music may induce emotions and recent studies in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have started to examine these hypotheses. After showing how music listening may tap into social cognition, and distinguishing between empathy and emotional contagion at the psychological and neural levels, this chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical support for the involvement of these two processes in music-induced emotions. Several implications for future research on music­induced emotions are discussed: (1) drawing from current efforts to reduce conceptual confusion in mainstream research on empathy and contagion, these concepts should be clearly distinguished and consistently used; (2) most current evidence focuses on empathy, but the involvement of contagion remains theoretically appealing and cannot be discarded; therefore, theories should consider both of these mechanisms; (3) a major challenge for future research is to disentangle the contributions of empathy and contagion, and their interplay with other psychological mechanisms such as visual imagery and memory; and ( 4) in order to support the causal roles of empathy and contagion, research should move from correlational to experimental approaches.