Can Music Increase Empathy? Interpreting Musical Experience Through The Empathizing–Systemizing (E-S) Theory: Implications For Autism (original) (raw)
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Recent research has shown that empathy plays an important role in musical experience including perception, preference, and performance [9,11,13,16,17]. Clarke, DeNora, and Vuoskoski’s [4] timely review extends this work by establishing a framework for how “music empathic engagement” can facilitate cultural understanding. In this commentary I raise attention to some additional factors that may be at play in their model.
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The 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 subsys...
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Questions about music's evolution and functions have long excited interest among scholars. More recent theoretical accounts have stressed the importance of music's social origins and functions. Autism and Williams syndrome, neurodevelopmental disorders supposedly characterized by contrasting social and musical phenotypes, have been invoked as evidence for these. However, empirical data on social skills and deficits in autism and Williams syndrome do not support the notion of contrasting social phenotypes: research findings suggest that the social deficits characteristic of both disorders may increase rather than reduce the importance of music. Current data do not allow for a direct comparison of musical phenotypes in autism and Williams syndrome, although it is noted that deficits in music cognition have been observed in Williams syndrome, but not in autism. In considering broader questions about musical understanding in neurodevelopmental disorders, we conclude that intellectual impairment is likely to result in qualitative differences between handicapped and typical listeners, but this does not appear to limit the extent to which individuals can derive benefits from the experience of listening to music.
Music: a unique window into the world of autism
Understanding emotions is fundamental to our ability to navigate the complex world of human social interaction. Individualswith autism spectrum disorders(ASD) experience difficultieswith the communication and understanding of emotions within the social domain. Their ability to interpret other people’s nonverbal, facial, and bodily expressions of emotion is strongly curtailed. However, there is evidence to suggest that many individuals with ASD show a strong and early preference for music and are able to understand simple and complex musical emotions in childhood and adulthood. The dissociation between emotion recognition abilities in musical and social domains in individuals with ASD provides us with the opportunity to consider the nature of emotion processing difficulties characterizing this disorder. There has recently been a surge of interest in musical abilities in individuals with ASD, and this has motivated new behavioral and neuroimaging studies.Here, we review this new work.We conclude by providing some questions for future directions.