Tal-Chen Rabinowitch

Long-term musical group interaction has a positive influence on empathy in children:

Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person’s emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation in MGI could help enhance a capacity for emotional empathy even outside of the musical context, through a familiarization with and refinement of MGI empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). We tested this hypothesis by designing an MGI programme for primary school children consisting of interactive musical games implementing various EPMCs. We ran the programme for an entire school year and compared the emotional empathy of MGI children to control children using existing and novel measures of empathy before and after the programme. Our results support our hypothesis: MGI children showed higher emotional empathy scores after the study compared to its beginning, and higher scores than control children at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional processes involved in musical interaction and highlight the remarkable potential of MGI for promoting positive social-emotional capacities such as empathy.

How anthropomorphism affects empathy toward robots

A long-standing question within the robotics community is about the degree of human-likeness robots ought to have when interacting with humans. We explore an unexamined aspect of this problem: how people empathize with robots along the anthropomorphic spectrum. We conducted an experiment that measured how people empathized with robots shown to be experiencing mistreatment by humans. Our results indicate that people empathize more strongly with more human-looking robots and less with mechanical-looking robots.

Cooperative gestures: effective signaling for humanoid robots

Cooperative gestures are a key aspect of human-human pro-social interaction. Thus, it is reasonable to expect that endowing humanoid robots with the ability to use such gestures when interacting with humans would be useful. However, while people are used to responding to such gestures expressed by other humans, it is unclear how they might react to a robot making them. To explore this topic, we conducted a within-subjects, video based laboratory experiment, measuring time to cooperate with a humanoid robot making interactional gestures. We manipulated the gesture type (beckon, give, shake hands), the gesture style (smooth, abrupt), and the gesture orientation (front, side). We also employed two measures of individual differences: negative attitudes toward robots (NARS) and human gesture decoding ability (DANVA2-POS). Our results show that people cooperate with abrupt gestures more quickly than smooth ones and front-oriented gestures more quickly than those made to the side, peoples speed at decoding robot gestures is correlated with their ability to decode human gestures, and negative attitudes toward robots is strongly correlated with a decreased ability in decoding human gestures.

Empathizing with robots: Fellow feeling along the anthropomorphic spectrum

A long-standing question within the robotics community is about the degree of human-likeness robots ought to have when interacting with humans. We explore an unexamined aspect of this problem: how people empathize with robots along the anthropomorphic spectrum. We conducted a web-based experiment (n = 120) that measured how people empathized with four different robots shown to be experiencing mistreatment by humans. Our results indicate that people empathize more strongly with more human-looking robots and less with mechanical looking robots. We also found that a persons general ability to empathize has no predictive value for expressed empathy toward robots.

Synchronous rhythmic interaction enhances children's perceived similarity and closeness towards each other.

Inter-personal synchronization is important for performing many cooperative tasks. Notably, synchrony has also been shown to have considerable positive social influences, possibly mediated by synchrony-induced changes in social attitude such as an increased sense of similarity and affiliation between interacting individuals. This effect has been demonstrated in adults, but it is unknown whether synchrony might have a similar impact on the social attitudes of children. We thus set to directly examine the influence of synchronous rhythmic interaction on perceived similarity and closeness in pairs of 8–9 year old children. We found that children who had participated in a synchronous interaction regarded their interacting partner as more similar and closer to themselves than children who had not interacted at all or who had taken part in an asynchronous interaction. These findings reveal that synchronous interaction can positively alter social attitudes between interacting children, suggesting a potential mechanism by which synchrony may enhance positive social interaction through attitudinal shift.

Synchronized movement experience enhances peer cooperation in preschool children

Cooperating with other people is a key achievement in child development and is essential for human culture. We examined whether we could induce 4-year-old children to increase their cooperation with an unfamiliar peer by providing the peers with synchronized motion experience prior to the tasks. Children were randomly assigned to independent treatment and control groups. The treatment of synchronous motion caused children to enhance their cooperation, as measured by the speed of joint task completion, compared with control groups that underwent asynchronous motion or no motion at all. Further analysis suggested that synchronization experience increased intentional communication between peer partners, resulting in increased coordination and cooperation.

Joint Rhythmic Movement Increases 4-Year-Old Children’s Prosocial Sharing and Fairness Toward Peers

The allocation of resources to a peer partner is a prosocial act that is of fundamental importance. Joint rhythmic movement, such as occurs during musical interaction, can induce positive social experiences, which may play a role in developing and enhancing young children’s prosocial skills. Here, we investigated whether joint rhythmic movement, free of musical context, increases 4-year-olds’ sharing and sense of fairness in a resource allocation task involving peers. We developed a precise procedure for administering joint synchronous experience, joint asynchronous experience, and a baseline control involving no treatment. Then we tested how participants allocated resources between self and peer. We found an increase in the generous allocation of resources to peers following both synchronous and asynchronous movement compared to no treatment. At a more theoretical level, this result is considered in relation to previous work testing other aspects of child prosociality, for example, peer cooperation, which can be distinguished from judgments of fairness in resource allocation tasks. We draw a conceptual distinction between two types of prosocial behavior: resource allocation (an other-directed individual behavior) and cooperation (a goal-directed collaborative endeavor). Our results highlight how rhythmic interactions, which are prominent in joint musical engagements and synchronized activity, influence prosocial behavior between preschool peers.

Music, empathy and cultural understanding: The need for developmental research: Comment on "Music, empathy and cultural understanding" by E. Clarke et al.

Clarke, DeNora and Vuoskoski have carried out a formidable task of preparing a profound and encompassing review [3] that brings together two highly complex and multifaceted concepts, empathy and music, as well as a specific aspect of empathy that is highly relevant to society, cultural understanding. They have done an extraordinary service in synthesizing the growing, but still highly fragmented body of work in this area. At the heart of this review lies an intricate model that the authors develop, which accounts for a variety of mechanisms and cognitive processes underlying musical empathic engagement. In what follows I would like to first point out what I think is unique about this model. Then, I will briefly describe the need for including in any such model a developmental angle. Despite empathy being “the most valuable resource in our world” [1], as Clarke et al. [3] cite in their review, not much research, theoretical or empirical has been done to unravel the potential of music in shaping empathic behavior. It is only in the last few years that practical interest in this intersection has sprung and new scientific, as well as ‘field’ evidence has started to surface leading to various accounts of the relationship between music and empathy [for example, see 7–9]. When integrating what we have learned so far into a comprehensive unifying model, it might be tempting to produce a universal, one-size-fits all model. Clarke et al. [3], however, imply that this is probably not the case with music and empathy. They argue that individual differences in cognitive styles (i.e. empathic disposition and susceptibility to contagion) can influence the ways in which people engage empathetically with music. The authors rely partly on a new study they performed [10] where music’s positive influence on subjects’ inter-cultural attitudes was mostly witnessed in people who rated themselves as having high dispositional empathy. This is consistent with previous findings that individual differences affect the ways in which we perceive music and specifically, emotions in music [for a review see 4]. Thus, it is important to take into account personality traits and individual differences when attempting to understand the impact of music on empathy. The prediction of Clarke et al.’s model is that the enhancing of empathy through music is at least in part selective to those individuals who are already ‘empathic’ to start with.

Joint rhythmic tapping elicits distinct emotions depending on tap timing and prior musical training.

Music plays a significant role in human life. It is a form of art and entertainment and a powerful medium for interpersonal interaction. The experience of listening to music is often emotional. Previous research has elucidated many of the mechanisms that effect an emotional response in the listener. In contrast, much less is known about how joint musical engagement impacts emotions. Here we focus on synchronized rhythmic interaction, a fundamental feature of musical engagement. There are theoretical reasons for hypothesizing that synchronized interaction should elicit positive affect among interacting individuals, although empirical studies performed with adults have found little consistent evidence for such an effect. We revisited this question, studying children instead of adults, and used an implicit measure of experienced affect to compare childrens responses to synchronized versus asynchronized joint tapping. Unlike previous studies, we distinguished between musically trained and untrained participants, because a background of musical training may be associated with altered emotional sensitivities to rhythmic interaction. We found a striking difference in emotional responses to synchronized versus asynchronized tapping, which strongly depended on musical training background. The untrained children responded to synchrony with more positive affect and less negative affect when compared to asynchrony, in line with theoretical predictions. In contrast, the musically trained children showed low positive affect following both synchrony and asynchrony and more negative affect in response to synchrony rather than asynchrony. These results suggest a possible emotional dissociation between synchronized and asynchronized interpersonal rhythmic interaction that may be influenced by musical training background. (PsycINFO Database Record