Empathy in Musicians: Self-Report Versus Performance on an Empathic Accuracy Task

Some studies indicate enhanced vocal emotion recognition and emotional prosody perception in musicians. Music perception has been linked to emotion processing. Collective music making has been found to rely on responding to and sharing the emotions of others. Together, these notions suggest musicians may have more empathy, which constitutes the ability to experience and understand others' emotions. In the present study, we asked 25 professional musicians and 23 non-musicians to complete the Empathy Quotient (EQ), a self-report questionnaire of affective and cognitive empathy, and a performance measure of empathic accuracy (EA) that involved watching and listening to video clips of targets narrating emotional autobiographical events. EA was derived per participant per clip by correlating their ratings of how targets felt while talking with previously collected target ratings. While musicians scored higher on both EQ subscales, they did not differ significantly from non-musicians in EA, obtained using rich stimuli involving both auditory and visual information. Hence, while musicians rated themselves to be more empathetic, we found no objective evidence of a musician benefit in empathy. It remains possible that this may show in less information-rich or more music-based situations. Alternatively, factors other than musical training alone may play a role.