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Examining effects of individual differences in empathy on behavioural and neural processing of musicAuthor: Vishnu Moorthigari Date: 2020-11-13 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/100 Advisor:Vinoo Alluri AbstractThe pervasive nature of music in human lives, from day to day activities to large scale concerts makes it an important part of human social interactions. From an evolutionary perspective, it has been argued that music has the capacity to evoke shared responses within groups, thereby allowing it to act as a form of social glue increasing group cohesion. One proposed mechanism for these shared responses is empathy. Over the last decade, a great deal of research has sought to identify the behavioural mechanisms underlying the affective capacity that music affords. These studies have put forth various theories that suggest an integral role played by empathy in inducing emotions while listening to music. In this thesis, we try to expand our understanding of empathy in the context of music processing from both behavioural and neural fronts. Through an extensive literature review, we find that previous studies on empathy have sought to examine it in terms of two distinct but related subsystems: The cognitive subsystem, which is concerned with top-down aspects of empathy such as motor-mimicry and the affective subsystem, which primarily deals with bottom-up aspects related to affect processing such as emotional contagion. In the first study, we looked at behavioural differences in self-reported continuous ratings of ”feeling moved” while participants listened to continuous pieces of music. Using a data-driven approach to cluster the ratings, we found significant differences in ”feeling moved” to both sad and joyful music modulated by participants’ affective empathy. Our results provided empirical support to the aforementioned Cognitive vs. Affective framework of empathy from a behavioural standpoint. In the second study, we sought to extend our earlier work by examining how empathy modulated brain responses while listening to music using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Prior to the current study, neuroimaging studies investigating the role of empathy in music processing have been scarce and did not examine functional connectivity in the brain. Our study overcomes this limitation by examining both global and localised processing of music modulated by empathy through graph-theory based methods. Overall, we found differences in global and local connectivity patterns in music processing modulated by participants’ trait empathy. Participants scoring higher on cognitive empathy tended to recruit mechanisms related to motor mimicry, whereas those scoring higher on affective empathy were found to recruit regions related to auditory affect processing. Both of our studies corroborate previous research in the field in addition to providing novel findings and as a result further supporting the existence of two subsystems in Cognitive vs. Affective framework of understanding empathy. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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