Tapping in Time Together: Investigating the Effects of Musicality and Empathy on Interpersonal Synchrony

The scientific community is trying uncover and understand the underlying mechanisms of music, movement and social cognition. As an attempt to do so, this thesis proposes an interactive model that hypothesizes a relationship between tapping ability and interpersonal synchrony, moderated by musicality and interpersonal synchrony. Furthermore, this study predicts that there is a relationship between these two moderators as well and that musicality predicts empathic perspective-taking. A sample of 209 participants was recruited to take part in an online experiment that included questionnaires on empathy and music, as well as a tapping task in which participants tapped along to music with another person on the screen and rated their feelings of synchrony with them. The results showed that even though the interaction of tapping ability and musicality and that of tapping ability and empathic perspective-taking were not significant, the full model did turn out to be significant. In addition...Show moreThe scientific community is trying uncover and understand the underlying mechanisms of music, movement and social cognition. As an attempt to do so, this thesis proposes an interactive model that hypothesizes a relationship between tapping ability and interpersonal synchrony, moderated by musicality and interpersonal synchrony. Furthermore, this study predicts that there is a relationship between these two moderators as well and that musicality predicts empathic perspective-taking. A sample of 209 participants was recruited to take part in an online experiment that included questionnaires on empathy and music, as well as a tapping task in which participants tapped along to music with another person on the screen and rated their feelings of synchrony with them. The results showed that even though the interaction of tapping ability and musicality and that of tapping ability and empathic perspective-taking were not significant, the full model did turn out to be significant. In addition, musicality significantly predicted the scores on empathic perspective-taking. These results strengthen the existing literature on the socially adaptive effects of synchrony and the connection between the mechanisms present in movement to music and empathic abilities. It is concluded that the knowledge from this study can be applied to treatment and non-clinical populations, but that more research is needed to uncover the underlying mechanisms of music, movement and social cognition by exploring different interaction models.Show less

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Tapping in Time Together: Investigating the Effects of Musicality and Empathy on Interpersonal Synchrony