Experiment Links Perceiving Emotions in Music and People

"If music evolved to help us navigate our social environment, and music is first and foremost a social behavior, then we would expect there'd be some sort of shared neural processes underlying both," Zachary Wallmark says.18percentgrey/Shutterstock

People who can skillfully interpret other people’s emotional states may also be better at assessing the emotions conveyed by music, new research shows.

Humans have been making music throughout recorded history, “but it doesn’t seem to serve any obvious biological function,” says University of Oregon musicologist and cognitive scientist Zachary Wallmark.