Music and Empathy

Elaine King, Caroline Waddington, Elaine King, Caroline Waddington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317092582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In recent years, empathy has received considerable research attention as a means of understanding a range of psychological phenomena, and it is fast drawing attention within the fields of music psychology and music education. This volume seeks to promote and stimulate further research in music and empathy, with contributions from many of the leading scholars in the fields of music psychology, neuroscience, music philosophy and education. It exposes current developmental, cognitive, social and philosophical perspectives on research in music and empathy, and considers the notion in relation to our engagement with different types of music and media. Following a Prologue, the volume presents twelve chapters organised into two main areas of enquiry. The first section, entitled 'Empathy and Musical Engagement', explores empathy in music education and therapy settings, and provides social, cognitive and philosophical perspectives about empathy in relation to our interaction with music. The second section, entitled 'Empathy in Performing Together', provides insights into the role of empathy across non-Western, classical, jazz and popular performance domains. This book will be of interest to music educators, musicologists, performers and practitioners, as well as scholars from other disciplines with an interest in empathy research.

Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Empathy and musical engagement

1 Towards a developmental model of musical empathy using insights from children who are on the autism spectrum or who have learning difficulties

Adam Ockelford

Introduction

This chapter interrogates the notion of ‘musical empathy’ (Livingstone & Thompson, 2009), and considers whether it is distinct from the widely acknowledged ‘emotional’ and ‘cognitive’ forms of empathy that function for most people in everyday life (Davis, 1996): that is, whether it is possible for one person, as a listener or a performer, to discern and appreciate others’ musical perspectives, without necessarily being able to identify more generally with their thoughts or feelings. It is suggested that musical empathy may itself be of two types, affective and cognitive, and that these pertain to the ‘content’ and ‘structure’ of music that, according to zygonic theory (Ockelford, 2005, 2012), make up the warp and the weft of the musical fabric. A challenge of this line of thinking is being able to identify contexts in which musical empathy may potentially be isolable from ‘everyday’ empathic thoughts and feelings, and a novel approach is adopted here, which considers case studies of children who are on the autism spectrum or who have learning difficulties (or both). This is because while research shows that children with autism generally find it difficult to grasp how others think and feel, typically lacking ‘theory of mind’ (Baron-Cohen, 1997), there is evidence to suggest that, in some cases, music may have the capacity to act as a vehicle through which they can relate empathically to other people (Greenberg, Rentfrow, & Baron-Cohen, 2015; Ockelford, 2013).

Previous research – the Sounds of Intent project – that sought to map the musical development of children with intellectual disabilities (Cheng, Ockelford, & Welch, 2009; Vogiatzoglou et al., 2011; Welch et al., 2009), suggests that, while these young people tread essentially the same music-developmental path as their ‘neurotypical’ peers, the stages of musical understanding that they attain take longer to evolve and so are easier to capture, facilitating their identification. The research has had to address certain difficulties, however, including the fact that such children may be non-verbal, or at least have little or no capacity for metacognition. As a consequence, data tend to be in the form of musical rather than verbal products, requiring the specialised music-analytical tools offered by zygonic theory to track musical intentionality and influence (Ockelford, 2012).

The results of such analysis undertaken in this study provide evidence that musical empathy may indeed exist as a discrete phenomenon, with distinct stages of development that run in parallel to the six music-developmental levels identified in Sounds of Intent. These entail traversing an ontogenetic path that potentially ranges from a state in which one has no sense of self or of other people (Level 1) to the position of having the (intuitive) notion of a proto-musical self and other (Level 2); thence having the recognition that there are others who are musically ‘like me’, in the moment, (Level 3); to those who are ‘like me, yet different’, to whom one can relate beyond the perceived present (Level 4); and so to an awareness that it is possible to share a musical journey with another or others through taking a common structural path (Level 5); and finally to a realisation that two musicians or more can work together to create a blended cognitive–emotional narrative in sound (Level 6). Here, musical empathy can extend beyond an understanding of the thinking and feelings of the individuals concerned to having a sense of the musical psyche of a wider cultural community.

What is empathy?

Through introspection and observation, philosophers and psychologists have identified two types of empathy: the kind through which we directly come to share the emotions of others, through an extension of ‘emotional contagion’ (‘catching’ the emotional states of others through being in their presence when they are showing how they feel), and the sort that enables us figuratively to put ourselves in others’ shoes, and appreciate their situation on an intellectual level (mental activity that may well also have an affective component) – the capacity for theory of mind (see, for example, Coplan, 2011; de Waal, 2008; Håkansson, 2003). In recent years, this dual classification has received some neuroscientific support (for example, Goldman, 2011; Shamay-Tsoory, Aharon-Peretz, & Perry, 2009).

A good deal of theoretical and empirical attention has also been devoted to the related issue of how empathy arises in human development (McDonald & Messsinger, 2011), in particular exploring Andrew Meltzoff’s contention that infant imitation (which starts in neonates) leads to the perception of other people as being ‘like me’, and that others who act in the way that I do are likely to have internal states that are ‘like mine’ (Meltzoff, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2007; Meltzoff & Moore, 1983, 1989). Some believe that a system of mirror neurons, which are activated not only when a person undertakes a particular action, but also when the same action is merely observed in another (Cattaneo & Rizzolatti, 2009; di Pellegrino et al., 1992; Gallese et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al., 1996) may lie at the heart of empathic responses (for example, Carr et al., 2003; Decety, 2004; Gallese, 2003; Iacoboni, 2009; Keysers, 2011; Miall, 2003; Preston & de Waal, 2002). Of particular interest in the current context is the finding that mirror neurons may be triggered by sounds as well as visual images (Kohler, 2002), and that, through this process, auditory input is capable of stimulating empathic reactions too (Gazzola, Aziz-Zadeh, & Keysers, 2006). For further discussion of mirror neurons, see also Molnar-Szakacs (this volume).

It is possible to model a mature empathic response as shown in Figure 1.1, which sets out the potential routes through which one person’s feelings or thoughts (or both) may be transferred to another. For example, Person A could convey what she or he thinks or feels (often, though not necessarily, elicited by a given set of external circumstances) through language, observable behaviours or actions. These may be detected by Person B, and the mental imagery so generated evoke similar thoughts and feelings to those of Person A. It is also possible for Person B to observe Person A experiencing a given set of circumstances and for these to elicit thoughts or feelings directly.

Figure 1.1 A model of how empathy may be engendered in everyday contexts.

This model makes certain assumptions. For the successful transmission of thoughts or feelings to occur and for empathy to be engendered requires that Person B has had a previous experience that has enough in common with that encountered by Person A to allow this to be appreciated; that Person B and Person A share the connotations of the language, behaviour or action that are present; that Person B reacts cognitively or affectively in the same way as Person A to a given set of circumstances; and that Person B is aware that his or her thoughts or feelings are elicited by the situation or disposition of Person A.

There are potential complications too. For example, Person B can experience empathy for someone who does not exist (who is purely imagined, or whose persona is conjured up in a novel, play, film or cartoon, for example); Person A may consciously seek to elicit empathic thoughts (where none is actually merited) in Person B through pretence; and Person B may experience empathy for Person A who has no related thoughts or feelings – for example, Person B may be aware that a tragedy is about to befall Person A, who is, however, ignorant of what is shortly going to occur.

Musical empathy: initial questions

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given music’s potential for conveying emotion and creating a sense of interpersonal connection, the notion of empathy has come to the notice of some researchers in the fields of music psychology and education, including, for example, Patrik Juslin (Juslin, 2001, 2009; Juslin & Västfjäll, 2008), who contends that listeners perceive the emotional expression conveyed by musicians in performance then ‘mimic’ this expression internally, and Seddon (2005) and Cross, Laurence and Rabinowitch (2012), who advance the idea of ‘empathic creativity’, through which interpersonal attunement may occur in group musical interaction.

But what is ‘musical empathy’? Is it ultimately the same as everyday empathy, but elicited via a different route (through abstract patterns of sound rather than words or actions, for example)? Or is it a way of sharing thoughts and feelings that is fundamentally different? Or can it be either according to context? Figure 1.2 models these two possibilities: the thicker dotted lines in the lower shaded box indicate the potential route to musical empathy; the thinner ones show everyday empathy being evoked in response to music. It is suggested that musical empathy may, like everyday empathy, have two strands: cognitive and affective.

To facilitate analysis of this issue, we will consider a group in whom musical empathy and everyday empathy appear to be uncoupled – those on the autism spectrum.

Autism and empathy

Empathy has become a focus of research in the area of autism, since emotional contagion and theory of mind are generally held by psychologists to be two of the principal deficits of those on the spectrum (see, for example, Baron-Cohen, 2005; Boucher, 2008; Frith, 2003; Happé, 1998), though some research (Mazza et al., 2014) has suggested that the deficit in affective empathy is limited to negative emotional valence. The conjecture that a defective mirror neuron system may be a contributory – even primary – factor in this developmental lacuna has found widespread (though not universal) support (see, for instance, Fan et al., 2010; Hadjikhani, 2005; Oberman et al., 2005; Ramachandran & Oberman, 2006; Rizzolatti & Fabbri-Destro, 2010; Williams et al., 2006). At the same time, while there are some accounts of young people on the autism spectrum playing music inexpressively or with scant regard to the aesthetic intent of fellow performers (Winner, 1996, p. 136), other studies have suggested that autistic children can detect the intended emotional import of music just as well as their neurotypical peers (Heaton, Hermelin, & Pring, 1999), and can perform with great sensitivity, with an awareness of the impact of their playing and singing on others and sensible to the expressive aspirations of other performers in ensembles (Ockelford, 2008, 2013). Indeed, it has been suggested that music-making with others may provide a vehicle for engaging the mirror neuron system in children on the autism spectrum (Wan et al., 2010).

Figure 1.2 What is ‘musical empathy’?

Hence, there may be a mismatch between the degree of empathy exhibited by people with autism in day-to-day life and that which they display (and so presumably experience) during musical engagement with others. Take, for example, Romy (of whom we will hear more later), who, at the time of writing, is 14 years old, severely developmentally delayed, with no formal expressive language, and with many of the characteristics of autism: she appears to be oblivious to the emotional states of those around her (the obverse of her infectious, effervescent egocentricity), and would be wholly unable to appreciate another’s point of view on an intellectual level through theory of mind. However, she is a young musician of extraordinary sensitivity, and enjoys playing familiar melodies on the piano with her right hand alone to the author’s improvised accompaniments, not only following the tempo, dynamics and articulation that are offered (in accordance with the expressive conventions of Western classical performance), but also predicting what her co-performer is likely to do next: delaying the placement of notes at the climaxes of phrases, for example, and even pushing the temporal envelope through rubato further than in the model that is provided. Observers comment on how Romy not only appears to have an intuitive understanding of the emotional narrative of the music that is projected from the harmonic framework and rhythm of the accompaniment, but that they find her playing musically persuasive and genuinely moving – a feeling that she seems to share, as she will often vocalise excitedly at the melodic climaxes that she articulates so compellingly and vigorously flaps her left hand (bot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prologue: revisiting the problem of empathy
• Part I Empathy and musical engagement
• Part II Empathy in performing together
• Index