Recent research has explored the role of empathy in the context of music listening. Here, through an empathy priming paradigm, situational empathy was shown to act as a causal mechanism in inducing emotion, although the way empathy was primed had low levels of ecological validity. We therefore conducted an online experiment to explore the extent to which information about a composer’s expressive intentions when writing a piece of music would significantly affect the degree to which participants reportedly empathise with the composer and in turn influence emotional responses to expressive music. A total of 229 participants were randomly assigned to three groups. The experimental group read short texts describing the emotions felt by the composer during the process of composition. To control for the effect of text regardless of its content, one control group read texts describing the characteristics of the music they were to hear, and a second control group was not given any textual information. Participants listened to 30-second excerpts of four pieces of music, selected to express emotions from the four quadrants of the circumplex theory of emotion. Having heard each music excerpt, participants rated the valence and arousal they experienced and completed a measure of situational empathy. Results show that situational empathy in response to music is significantly associated with trait empathy. As opposed to those in the control conditions, participants in the experimental group responded with significantly higher levels of situational empathy. Receiving this text significantly moderated the effect of the expressiveness of stimuli on induced emotion, indicating that it induced empathy. We conclude that empathy can be induced during music listening through the provision of information about the specific emotions of a person relating to the music. These findings contribute to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie emotional responses to music.

最近的研究探索了移情在音乐聆听中的作用。在这里，尽管通过共情引发的范式，情境共情被证明是诱发情绪的一种因果机制，尽管通过共情引发的方式生态效度较低。因此，我们进行了一项在线实验，以探讨有关创作者在创作音乐时表达意图的信息在多大程度上会影响参与者据称对作曲家的同情程度，进而影响对表达音乐的情感反应。总共229名参与者被随机分为三组。实验小组阅读了简短的文字，描述了作曲家在创作过程中所感受到的情绪。为了控制文本的效果，而不管其内容如何，一个对照组阅读描述他们所听音乐特征的文本，而第二个对照组则未获得任何文本信息。参加者听了四首音乐的30秒摘录，这些摘录是从情感绕线理论的四个象限中选择用来表达情感的。参加者听完每个音乐摘录后，对他们所经历的效价和唤醒进行了评估，并完成了情境共情的评估。结果表明，对音乐的情境共情与特质共情显着相关。与对照组相比，实验组的参与者对情景共情的反应明显更高。收到这段文字后，可以显着缓解刺激的表现形式对诱发情绪的影响，表明它引起了同理心。我们得出的结论是，通过提供有关与音乐有关的人的特定情感的信息，可以在音乐聆听期间诱发同理心。这些发现有助于人们理解对音乐进行情感反应的心理机制。