Your pleasure is mine; when people share amusical emotional experience during a livemusic performance in a concert hall.

Abstract

Over the years, several publications have proposed that musical sound could be an ancestral emotional way of communication, thus positing an ancestral biological function for music. Understanding how musical emotions, and the pleasure derived from music regardless of the musical valence, can be shared between individuals is a fascinating question, and investigating it can shed light on the function of musical reward. Is the pleasure felt at the individual level transmitted on a collective level? And if so, how? We investigated these questions in a natural setting during an international competition for orchestra conductors. Participants (n=15) used a dedicated smartphone app to report their subjective emotional experiences in real time during a concert. We recorded participants electrodermal activity (EDA) and cerebral activity with electroencephalography (EEG). The overall behavioral real time ratings suggest a possible social influence on the reported and felt pleasure. The physically closer the participants, the more similar their reported pleasure. We estimated the inter-individual cerebral coherence, which indicates the degree of mutual cerebral information between pairs of participants in the frequency domain. The results show that when people simultaneously reported either high or low pleasure, their cerebral activities were closer than for simultaneous neutral pleasure reports. Participants skin conductance levels were also more coupled when reporting higher emotional degrees simultaneously. More importantly, the participants who were physically closer had higher cerebral coherence, but only when they simultaneously reported intense pleasure. We propose that mechanisms of emotional contagion and/or emotional resonance could explain why a form of emotional connecting force could arise between people.