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

2017

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…