Music in the Social and Behavioral

Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Empathy

Contributors: Marissa Silverman

Edited by: William Forde Thompson
Book Title: Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Encyclopedia
Chapter Title: "Empathy"
Pub. Date: 2014
Access Date: March 25, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781452283036
Online ISBN: 9781452283012
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452283012.n129
Print pages: 391-392
©2014 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of
the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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The emotional significance of music has been a topic of scholarship for centuries. For
example, Plato and Aristotle thought that happy music tends to make people happy and sad
music tends to make people sad. But is this plausible? Notwithstanding that musical sounds
can arouse human emotions, what, specifically, is there to be happy or sad about/in musical
sounds alone? In reality, nothing of human consequence has happened to cause one to feel
happy or sad. Or has it? Part of the answer to this query lies in understanding the connection
between music and empathy.

The word empathy did not emerge in the English language until the early 1900s.
Nevertheless, though the concept of empathy is recent, it is extremely likely that empathy has
been part of the human repertoire of emotions and dispositions since the earliest ancestor
humans emerged from Africa. If not, what motivated and enabled human ancestors to live with
each other in their communities for the shared purposes of growing, surviving, and
reproducing? In other words, empathy is not only a feeling; it is a practical necessity and a
“tool” for relating to others and making one's way in the world. And so is music. Music is a
social practice that people make and listen to with and for others. Examining music through
the lens of empathy, and vice versa, is one way of bringing the nature and values of empathy
into sharper focus, because, for one thing, music and empathy are intersubjective and
interpersonal processes. However, to understand these connections a little more deeply,
empathy needs to be examined from additional perspectives.

The phenomenon and concept of empathy has puzzled philosophers and psychologists for
centuries. Until recently, scholars have made little progress in understanding what empathy
involves.

Philosophical Theories of Empathy

In philosophical discourse, empathy began as a category of aesthetics. The English concept

of empathy derives from the Greek pathos (feeling for) and the German einfühlung (feeling
into). The idea of empathy as “feeling into” was first evident in considerations of nature, works
of art, and the thoughts and feelings of others. Also, German literary theorists and poets
began to “project” subject onto object, which in turn led to the idea that natural objects and
artworks possess “aesthetic value.” According to German philosophy generally, and
Enlightenment aesthetics particularly, empathy enables perceivers to experience aesthetic
satisfaction. In contemporary terms, an object or artwork does not possess aesthetic
satisfaction in and of itself—satisfaction occurs at the nexus of an artwork and the self's
empathy as “given to” a work.

This kind of thinking led to phenomenological considerations of empathy in the sense that
when one is able or willing to feel into or empathize with an artwork or person, one begins to
understand affectively the “other.” Current perspectives in phenomenology capitalize on this
self-other intersubjectivity. Many phenomenologists argue that empathy is an intentional act
toward another insofar as one person experiences another as someone who possesses
corporeal, affective, and intellectual attributes that are recognized and understood,
consciously or unconsciously, as relating to or mirroring oneself.

Psychological Theories of Empathy

Psychology tends to view empathy through interrelated affective and cognitive processes
involving the self and other. Self and other are able to “enact” each other because a human

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being's first-person sense of him/herself has the capacity to recognize him/herself relationally
and empathetically as another. In such cases, three distinct levels are interconnected: first,
feeling what another is feeling; second, understanding what another person is feeling; and
third, responding in consideration of another's feelings (sometimes referred to as “sympathy”).
These levels of mutual emotional-cognitive integration are possible, in large part because the
human brain and body possess and use “mirror neurons” that enable people to relate to each
other and, therefore, to make their way in their social worlds. The existence of mirror neurons
helps to explain a range of feelings, including empathy. In short, people perceive and “mirror”
the actions and emotions of others and respond in appropriate manners (with affection, fear,
sadness, happiness, and so forth).

Additionally, and according to psychological research, people can empathize with others
because of their capacity for dynamic, sensorimotor coupling (or pairing). Briefly, humans
tend to bond with others because they recognize corporeal, emotional, and cognitive
similarities in others. Mutually perceived sensory and motor processes initiate or motivate such
coupling, especially when humans relate empathetically via bodily gestures, movements, and
other physical features (e.g., smiles, frowns, tears). One aspect of being human is that
various body-mind processes promote and facilitate interdependent bonding. Empathy is one
aspect of body-mind interdependency.

Music Performance and Listening

Listeners tend to empathize (consciously and/or unconsciously) with musical sounds in the
sense of empathizing with the composer and/or the performer of a work. This occurs because
individual listeners mirror, respond to, and simulate internally what they feel the composer
and/or performer(s) are attempting to express emotionally, visually, and so on. Through
empathizing, listeners may feel “as if” they are experiencing the same feelings as the
composer/performer(s) in themselves. Feeling “as if” may be bodily: for example,
synchronization to/with music helps propel this phenomenon. Sometimes one imagines via
empathy what the performer feels when performing and moving with the music; sometimes
one imagines via empathy what a composer (for example, in Western classical music or jazz)
felt like when composing. While these feelings may be real or imagined, such connections
may be felt while listening. In short, affective connections between self and music (whether as
a listener or a performer) are relational.

Music Education

In terms of music teaching and learning, it is important to understand that empathy is not (as
originally conceived in aesthetics) wholly projective. One does not project one's selfhood
toward another to understand cognitively something or someone. Instead, and in line with
contemporary care ethics, empathy is receptive; it is the automatic assessment of another's
feelings, a state of being and feeling what another is feeling. Understanding empathy as an
integrated response or process of body, cognition, and emotion is important for education
generally and for music education specifically. For example, it is important for students to
learn how to reflect on why and what a student is feeling when she or he makes another feel,
say, badly; it is also important to teach students, via empathy, why this is not a good way of
relating to each other.

Helping students reflect on why and how they empathize, or not, with various examples of
music is a way of assisting students to understand their real-world emotional selves.

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Musically, self-other reflection helps students learn to “read” each other's expressive musical
actions (phrasing, slight deviations in tempi, etc.) in order to cohesively interpret a piece of
music. In jazz, for example, this would be called feeling the “groove” together. When students
read each other's musical contributions through empathy, this often leads to expressive and
joyful music making.

empathy
music education
music
performers
mirror neurons
aesthetics
mirroring

Marissa Silverman, Montclair State University

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452283012.n129
See Also:

Emotion
Emotional Contagion
Human Behavior, Music as
Mirror Neurons

Further Readings
Copland, A. and P. Goldie, eds. Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. New
York: O x f o r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s, 2011.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199539956.001.0001
De Waal, F. “The ‘Russian Doll’ Model of Empathy and Imitation.” In On Being Moved: From
Mirror Neurons to Empathy, S. Braten, ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.
Leman, M. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008.
Noddings, N. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkely: University
of California Press, 1984/2003.
Slote, M. From Enlightenment to Receptivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199970704.001.0001
Thompson, E. Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

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