Relationships Between Music and Empathic Decision Making in Healthy Young Adults

Abstract

Music and empathy are components of social experience. Similar and adjacent functional brain systems are required in the production and understanding of music, the processing of emotion, and engagement in social behavior. Activity in these brain systems is often reflected in autonomic features, including dynamic behavior of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. Music may influence prosocial behavior and this effect may be reflected by the behavior of the autonomic nervous system. This experiment was designed to evaluate these relationships. Healthy undergraduate students ( N = 60) participated in Cyberball, a task sensitive to differences in prosocial behavior, while listening to or not listening to different types of music. Results indicated that music positively affects prosocial behavior, but autonomic activity does not reflect the degree of music’s effect on prosocial behavior.