Let’s Create More Considerate Individuals By Listening to Sad Music!
Are you trying to get a room full of kindergarteners to share their toys at recess and to get along with each other? Maybe you hope for the children to comfort a crying classmate rather than make fun of them. Perhaps they could all benefit from some increases in empathy and prosocial behavior. Well, what you might need is to project a sad video accompanied by some sad music across the room.
To better understand the study that I will be introducing, let’s clear up some useful terms that can easily be confused for each other! First, empathy is known as the experience of feeling another’s emotions. When your best friend shares about how awful their day was, do you feel frustrated as well? Next, compassion is when one feels sympathetic and sad for the misfortunes of others. Do you wish that your perpetually unlucky aunt would win the lottery someday soon? Meanwhile, prosocial behavior is an altruistic means of helping others. If you’re late to class but a stranger asks for directions, would you stop to help? Finally, theory of mind refers to an understanding of another’s emotions and cognition as separate from one’s own. Do you understand that we all have different frameworks for processing the emotional world?
Researchers Brennan McDonald, Anne Bockler, and Philipp Kanske from Leibniz University Hannover aimed to examine how emotional music could impact empathy, compassion, and theory of mind (McDonald et al., 2022). Do we listen to dramatic playlists in the car simply to enjoy the way that the music sounds, or do we feel more considerate toward others as a result? Do we better understand others socially upon listening? 60 students from Technische Universitat Dresden (of whom 43 were female and the average age was 24.55 years) aided in answering these questions through an online experiment. They were rewarded with course credit or money through their university study portal; it looks like their participation was out of academic and monetary gain rather than purely prosocial intent!
Participants were shown a 15-second clip of either a neutral or negatively emotional event, such as a transition into a new apartment or a father’s suicide, respectively. Music with either neutral or negative affect from film soundtracks — which had been previously rated independently on their influence on affect (the feeling, emotion, or mood experienced) — were played along with each video. Participants rated how they felt on a continuous scale; negative emotional ratings after a negative sample were interpreted as demonstrating higher empathy (this makes sense, as feeling sad after witnessing someone else’s sadness indicates an ability to feel others’ emotions). Participants also continuously rated the amount of compassion that they felt. Next, they answered questions pertaining either to how the person in the video was thinking (to measure Theory of Mind) or to identify a true statement (to measure factual reasoning). The final continuous scale measured participants’ willingness to help the person in the video (to measure prosocial decision).
(Below, “Hatred at Its Best” is an example of a neutral clip used, and “Memories of the Village” is an example of a negative clip used in the study).
Participants were mostly unfamiliar with the music, with an average familiarity rating of the music in the experiment being 0.75 on a scale of 0 to 12 (eliminating bias due to familiarity). A standardized questionnaire was also utilized to assess participants’ social and emotional interest in music. Are you someone who cares about the deeper meaning of a song and who frequents concerts by your favorite artists, or someone who just turns on the radio halfheartedly to pass the time?
Emotionally negative videos resulted in higher ratings of negative affect (indicating empathy) and greater compassion in comparison to neutral videos. It looks like the audio and visual stimuli really left an effect on viewers! Movie directors would be happy to hear that news any day. Emotionally negative music resulted in higher ratings of negative affect (higher empathy) as well, but did not affect compassion. Greater empathy and compassion were reported upon being presented with an emotionally negative video with negative music compared to an emotionally negative video with neutral music (McDonald et al., 2022). That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Double the dose of sadness, double the concern (assuming that you care about others’ feelings).
Compassion and prosocial decisions — but not empathy, Theory of Mind, or factual reasoning — were positively correlated with one’s social and emotional interest in music (McDonald et al., 2022). Maybe it’s time to increase funding for those often-neglected music departments in public schools in order to solve the problem of selfish children.
These impacts of emotional music didn’t extend to ToM: When assessing the answers from the multiple-choice questions, the researchers found that emotional music did not significantly affect Theory of Mind in terms of accuracy or reaction time. That’s unfortunate for those looking to improve their social intelligence. Additionally, higher prosocial decisions were measured after watching negative videos. Prosocial decisions were also more common when emotional videos were paired with emotional music rather than neutral music (McDonald et al., 2022). If you want those rambunctious kindergarteners to start offering each other cupcakes rather than shoving each other out of line to reach them first, I hope you paid attention to the last sentence. There were no gender differences for these main findings. Contrary to gender stereotypes about women being more emotional and empathetic, it looks like sad music videos don’t discriminate!
Though social affect and prosocial decision-making were increased upon listening to emotional music in an emotionally negative context, social cognition was unaffected. Watching a sad movie might cause you to feel sadder for the main character who was tragically widowed at a young age — it might even inspire you to go out there and provide her with a shoulder to cry on — but it won’t lead you to better understand her mindset of the world. Don’t forget to ask yourself whether you view music as an emotional experience, as doing so may help you behave prosocially toward others. Next time that it rains outside and recess is moved indoors, play a sad, age-appropriate music video and start the kindergarteners’ journey toward experiencing more tender feelings toward each other’s emotions!
References
[McCombs School of Business]. (2018, December 18). Prosocial Behavior — Ethics Defined [Video]. Youtube. https://youtu.be/b4CfyLe0IlQ
McDonald, B., Böckler, A., & Kanske, P. (2022). Soundtrack to the social world: Emotional music enhances empathy, compassion, and prosocial decisions but not theory of mind. Emotion, 22(1), 19–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001036
[Parent Lab]. (2018, July 18). Theory of Mind [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/6SniaiSbx7o
