Is Empathy Related to the Perception of Emotional Expression in Music? A Multimodal Time-Series Analysis

Recent theories of empathy highlight perception-action components as a basis for automatic responses to perceived emotions. Since music is universally based on human actions and often elicits strong emotions, it was hypothesized that empathy influences audiovisual estimations of emotional expression. In this study, the performance and perception of a string quartet was investigated using time-series analyses. Quartet musicians rated video presentations of their own performance, resulting in relationships between visual-only and auditory-only judgments as well as acoustical intensity measures. Independent observers accurately perceived the string quartet's expressive intentions in multimodal presentations. Observers with higher affective and overall empathy were more accurate at estimating the musicians' intentions. It is argued that empathy-via the perception of bodily motion-has an impact on the appreciation of performing arts such as music.