Schedule of Events | Symposia

Finding the Self in Other’s Music: Self and Other Representations in Prefrontal & Parietal Cortices During Music Listening

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Nicholas Kathios¹ (kathios.n@northeastern.edu), Kelsie L. Lopez¹, Rebecca Hennessy¹, Quincy Dillard¹, Fahim Ahmed², Rishitha Kudaravalli¹, Juliet Y. Davidow¹, Laurel J. Gabard-Durnam¹, Psyche Loui¹; ¹Northeastern University, ²Harvard University

Music has a unique ability to foster bonds between listeners. People affiliate with others who have similar musical tastes, suggesting that music listening may engage networks of the brain supporting social cognition and empathy (the ability to understand others’ affective states). Listening to self-selected (relative to researcher-selected) music engages areas of the brain which support self-referential processing, e.g., the default mode network. However, these results are confounded by the effect of liking: participants self-select music they like. Here, we disentangle self-selection and liking by asking participants to 1) self-select music they do and do not like, and 2) rate whether the music matches their own taste. Young adults (n=36) listened to self- or researcher-selected musical excerpts while undergoing fMRI. Participants rated each excerpt on liking and how closely it resembled their own music or that of close friends, acquaintances, or strangers (social closeness). More liked musical excerpts (regardless of self- vs. researcher-selection) elicited activation in the ventral striatum and ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), but this did not overlap with the effect of listening to self- over researcher-selected music in the the dorsal mPFC (regardless of liking). Furthermore, a parametric contrast on social-closeness ratings showed negative effects in the right supramarginal gyrus, an area implicated in empathy tasks (p<0.05,TFCE-FWE-corrected). Results suggest that music listening, depending on its perceived social closeness, can activate brain networks implicated in self- and other-representations and empathizing independent of liking.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Self perception