Higher empathy is associated with stronger social bonding when moving together with music

2021 ◽  
pp. 030573562110506
Author(s):  
Jan Stupacher ◽  
Jannie Mikkelsen ◽  
Peter Vuust
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Social Stimulus ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Virtual Self ◽  
Interpersonal Synchrony ◽  
Trait Empathy

Empathy—understanding and sharing the feelings and experiences of others—is one of our most important social capacities. Music is a social stimulus in that it involves communication of mental states, imitation of behavior, and synchronization of movements. As empathy and music are so closely linked, we investigated whether higher empathy is associated with stronger social bonding in interpersonal interactions that feature music. In two studies, participants watched videos in which we manipulated interpersonal synchrony between the movements of a virtual self and a virtual other person during walking with instrumental music or a metronome. In both studies, temporally aligned movements increased social bonding with the virtual other and higher empathy was associated with increased social bonding in movement interactions that featured music. Additionally, in Study 1, participants with lower empathy felt more connected when interacting with a metronome compared to music. In Study 2, higher trait empathy was associated with strong increases of social bonding when interacting with a temporally aligned virtual other, but only weak increases of social bonding with a temporally misaligned virtual other. These findings suggest that empathy plays a multifaceted role in how we enjoy, interpret, and use music in social situations.

Considering Others’ Mental States Causally Increases Feelings of Social Bonding and Information Sharing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Baek ◽  
Diana Tamir ◽  
Emily B. Falk
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Information Sharing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Health News ◽  
Brain Behavior ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Share Information ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Mentalizing System

Information sharing is a ubiquitous social behavior. What causes people to share? Mentalizing, or considering the mental states of other people, has been theorized to play a central role in information sharing, with higher activity in the brain’s mentalizing system associated with increased likelihood to share information. In line with this theory, we present novel evidence that mentalizing causally increases information sharing. In three pre-registered studies (n = 400, 840, and 3500 participants), participants who were instructed to consider the mental states of potential information receivers indicated higher likelihood to share health news compared to a control condition where they were asked to reflect on the content of the article. Certain kinds of mentalizing were particularly effective; in particular, considering receivers’ emotional and positive mental states, led to the greatest increase in likelihood to share. The relationship between mentalizing and sharing was mediated by feelings of closeness with potential receivers. Mentalizing increased feelings of connectedness to potential receivers, and in turn, increased likelihood of information sharing. Considering receivers’ emotional, positive, and inward-focused mental states was most effective at driving participants to feel closer with potential receivers and increase sharing. Data provide evidence for a causal relationship between mentalizing and information sharing and provide insight about the mechanism linking mentalizing and sharing. Taken together, these results advance theories of information sharing and shed light on previously observed brain-behavior relationships.

scholarly journals Visually attending to a video together facilitates great ape social closeness

2019 ◽  
Vol 286 (1907) ◽  
pp. 20190488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wouter Wolf ◽  
Michael Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Human Study ◽  
Great Apes ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
External Stimulus ◽  
Great Ape ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
Social Closeness ◽  
Psychological Mechanism

Humans create social closeness with one another through a variety of shared social activities in which they align their emotions or mental states towards an external stimulus such as dancing to music together, playing board games together or even engaging in minimal shared experiences such as watching a movie together. Although these specific behaviours would seem to be uniquely human, it is unclear whether the underlying psychology is unique to the species, or if other species might possess some form of this psychological mechanism as well. Here we show that great apes who have visually attended to a video together with a human (study 1) and a conspecific (study 2) subsequently approach that individual faster (study 1) or spend more time in their proximity (study 2) than when they had attended to something different. Our results suggest that one of the most basic mechanisms of human social bonding—feeling closer to those with whom we act or attend together—is present in both humans and great apes, and thus has deeper evolutionary roots than previously suspected.

scholarly journals Move together, bond together: Visuomotor synchrony and social bonding in children and adults

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen M Howard ◽  
Danielle Ropar ◽  
Roger Newport ◽  
Bahar Tuncgenc
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Interaction Partner ◽  
Social Closeness ◽  
Interpersonal Synchrony ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Middle Class Families

Interpersonal synchrony is a fundamental part of human social interaction, with known effects on facilitating social bonding. Moving in time with another person facilitates prosocial behaviour, however, it is unknown if the degree of synchronisation predicts the degree of social bonding. Similarly, while people readily fall in synchrony even without being instructed to do so, we do not know whether such spontaneous synchronisation elicits similar prosocial effects as instructed synchronisation. Across two studies, we investigated how context (social vs non-social stimulus) and instruction (instructed vs uninstructed) influenced synchronisation accuracy and bonding with the interaction partner in adults (Study 1; 34 women, 6 men, Mage = 20.38, predominantly White undergraduates) and children (Study 2; 27 girls, 26 boys Mage = 8.80, from predominantly White middle-class families). The results revealed improved visuomotor synchrony within a social, compared to non-social, context in adults and children. Children, but not adults, synchronised more accurately when instructed to synchronise than when uninstructed. For both children and adults, synchronisation in a social context elicited stronger social bonding towards an interaction partner as compared to synchronisation in a non-social context. Finally, children’s, but not adults’, degree of synchrony with the partner was significantly associated with their feelings of social closeness. These findings illuminate the interaction of sensorimotor coupling and joint action in social contexts and how these mechanisms facilitate synchronisation ability and social bonding.

scholarly journals Social context facilitates visuomotor synchrony and bonding in children and adults

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Howard ◽  
Danielle Ropar ◽  
Roger Newport ◽  
Bahar Tunçgenç
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Bonding ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Interaction Partner ◽  
Social Closeness ◽  
Fundamental Part ◽  
Interpersonal Synchrony ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Sensorimotor Coupling ◽  
Do So

AbstractInterpersonal synchrony is a fundamental part of human social interaction, with known effects on facilitating social bonding. Moving in time with another person facilitates prosocial behaviour, however, it is unknown if the degree of synchronisation predicts the degree of social bonding. Similarly, while people readily fall in synchrony even without being instructed to do so, we do not know whether such spontaneous synchronisation elicits similar prosocial effects as instructed synchronisation. Across two studies, we investigated how context (social vs non-social stimulus) and instruction (instructed vs uninstructed) influenced synchronisation accuracy and bonding with the interaction partner in adults and children. The results revealed improved visuomotor synchrony within a social, compared to non-social, context in adults and children. Children, but not adults, synchronised more accurately when instructed to synchronise than when uninstructed. For both children and adults, synchronisation in a social context elicited stronger social bonding towards an interaction partner as compared to synchronisation in a non-social context. Finally, children’s, but not adults’, degree of synchrony with the partner was significantly associated with their feelings of social closeness. These findings illuminate the interaction of sensorimotor coupling and joint action in social contexts and how these mechanisms facilitate synchronisation ability and social bonding.

scholarly journals The Default Mode of Human Brain Function Primes the Intentional Stance

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 1116-1124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Spunt ◽  
Meghan L. Meyer ◽  
Matthew D. Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Brain Function ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Social Stimulus ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
Human Tendency ◽  
The Mind

Humans readily adopt an intentional stance to other people, comprehending their behavior as guided by unobservable mental states such as belief, desire, and intention. We used fMRI in healthy adults to test the hypothesis that this stance is primed by the default mode of human brain function present when the mind is at rest. We report three findings that support this hypothesis. First, brain regions activated by actively adopting an intentional rather than nonintentional stance to a social stimulus were anatomically similar to those demonstrating default responses to fixation baseline in the same task. Second, moment-to-moment variation in default activity during fixation in the dorsomedial PFC was related to the ease with which participants applied an intentional—but not nonintentional—stance to a social stimulus presented moments later. Finally, individuals who showed stronger dorsomedial PFC activity at baseline in a separate task were generally more efficient when adopting the intentional stance and reported having greater social skills. These results identify a biological basis for the human tendency to adopt the intentional stance. More broadly, they suggest that the brain's default mode of function may have evolved, in part, as a response to life in a social world.

What Neuroscience Can Tell Us about Social Situations

2018 ◽  
pp. 436-455
Author(s):  
Kalina Michalska ◽  
Gwendolyn Gardiner ◽  
Brent L. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Situational Context ◽  
Situational Contexts ◽  
Situational Experience ◽  
Neuroimaging Techniques

The goal of this chapter is to highlight how neuroimaging techniques can complement behavioral approaches for understanding situations. The chapter describes three situational contexts relevant to applying these techniques to study situational contexts. First, it considers the neuroimaging environment itself as situational context and delineates unique features of this environment that can impact subjective experience. Second, it reviews methodological trends for eliciting situational experiences in a neuroimaging environment, particularly in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Third, it discusses recent neuroimaging evidence suggesting that diverse social situations share common underlying neural responses. The chapter highlights how manipulating an individual’s construal of a situation can provide additional insights into the neurobiology of positive and negative situations. Together, neuroimaging approaches can provide one organizing principle for the vast constellation of situations. The hope is to encourage researchers to apply these approaches to gain novel and complementary insights into situational experience.

scholarly journals What Is on Your Mind? Impaired Social Cognition in Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma Patients Despite Ongoing Complete Remission

Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 943
Author(s):  
Milena Pertz ◽  
Thomas Kowalski ◽  
Patrizia Thoma ◽  
Uwe Schlegel
Keyword(s):  
Central Nervous System ◽  
Nervous System ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Complete Remission ◽  
Central Nervous System Lymphoma ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Term Survival

Within the past decades, long-term survival was achieved in a substantial fraction of primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) patients, expanding the focus of research to their quality of life (QoL). Social relationships crucially contribute to well-being in the context of adversity. Therefore, abilities that facilitate social interactions essentially determine QoL. The present study specifically targeted those sociocognitive abilities. Forty-three PCNSL patients with ongoing complete remission to therapy for at least one year and 43 healthy controls matched for age, gender and education were examined with standardized self-report and behavioral measures of social cognition. An impaired ability to comprehend others´ feelings was found in patients for both positive and negative mental states. Patients had difficulties in identifying the awkward element in challenging social situations, whereas the degree of discomfort experienced in those situations was comparable between groups. Both the production of optimal solutions for social situations and the mere recognition of these among less optimal strategies were impaired in patients. Clinicians should be aware of possible sociocognitive impairment and ought to address this in additional supportive interventions. Impaired sociocognitive abilities may entail social conflicts at a time when patients rely on social support. This, in turn, could detrimentally affect QoL.

scholarly journals Action Understanding in Infancy: Do Infant Interpreters Attribute Enduring Mental States or Track Relational Properties of Transient Bouts of Behavior?

2017 ◽  
pp. 237-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Fenici ◽  
Tadeusz Zawidzki
Keyword(s):  
Social Ontology ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Human Infants ◽  
Relational Properties ◽  
Minimal Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alternative Characterization ◽  
Available Information

We address recent interpretations of infant performance on spontaneous false belief tasks. According to most views, these experiments show that human infants attribute mental states from a very young age. Focusing on one of the most clearly worked out, minimalist versions of this idea, Butterfill and Apperly's (2013) "minimal theory of mind" framework, we defend an alternative characterization: the minimal theory of rational agency. On this view, rather than conceiving of social situations in terms of states of an enduring mental substance animating agents, infant interpreters parse observed bouts of behavior and their contexts into goals, rational means to those goals, and available information. In other words, the social ontology of infant interpreters consists in goal-directed, (mis- or un-) informed bouts of behavior, by non-enduring agents, rather than agents animated by states of enduring, unobservable minds. We discuss a number of experiments that support this interpretation of infant socio-cognitive competence.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of economic game playing

2008 ◽  
Vol 363 (1511) ◽  
pp. 3859-3874 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Krueger ◽  
Jordan Grafman ◽  
Kevin McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Trust Game ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Neuronal Mechanisms ◽  
Mathematical Formalization ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Brain

The theory of games provides a mathematical formalization of strategic choices, which have been studied in both economics and neuroscience, and more recently has become the focus of neuroeconomics experiments with human and non-human actors. This paper reviews the results from a number of game experiments that establish a unitary system for forming subjective expected utility maps in the brain, and acting on these maps to produce choices. Social situations require the brain to build an understanding of the other person using neuronal mechanisms that share affective and intentional mental states. These systems allow subjects to better predict other players' choices, and allow them to modify their subjective utility maps to value pro-social strategies. New results for a trust game are presented, which show that the trust relationship includes systems common to both trusting and trustworthy behaviour, but they also show that the relative temporal positions of first and second players require computations unique to that role.

scholarly journals Transitory Inhibition of the Left Anterior Intraparietal Sulcus Impairs Joint Actions: A Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 737-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia M. Sacheli ◽  
Gaetano Tieri ◽  
Salvatore M. Aglioti ◽  
Matteo Candidi
Keyword(s):  
Intraparietal Sulcus ◽  
Theta Burst Stimulation ◽  
Burst Stimulation ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Joint Actions ◽  
Action Goal ◽  
Interpersonal Synchrony ◽  
Anterior Intraparietal Sulcus ◽  
Theta Burst ◽  
Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation

Although temporal coordination is a hallmark of motor interactions, joint action (JA) partners do not simply synchronize; rather, they dynamically adapt to each other to achieve a joint goal. We created a novel paradigm to tease apart the processes underlying synchronization and JA and tested the causal contribution of the left anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS) in these behaviors. Participants had to synchronize their congruent or incongruent movements with a virtual partner in two conditions: (i) being instructed on what specific action to perform, independently from what action the partner performed (synchronization), and (ii) being instructed to adapt online to the partner's action (JA). Offline noninvasive inhibitory brain stimulation (continuous theta-burst stimulation) over the left aIPS selectively modulated interpersonal synchrony in JA by boosting synchrony during congruent interactions and impairing it during incongruent ones, while leaving performance in the synchronization condition unaffected. These results suggest that the left aIPS plays a causal role in supporting online adaptation to a partner's action goal, whereas it is not necessarily engaged in social situations where the goal of the partner is irrelevant. This indicates that, during JAs, the integration of one's own and the partner's action goal is supported by aIPS.

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