Joint music listening enhances interpersonal affective and neural synchrony

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/xf9te_v1
• Publication Date: 2025-03-14T01:49:14Z
• Authors: Federico Curzel; Barbara Tillmann; Arnaud Fournel; Giacomo Novembre; Laura Ferreri

Music is one of the most pleasurable stimuli in humans’ life, often experienced social contexts where shared enjoyment can amplify emotional responses. Despite its significance, neural and affective mechanisms underlying socially music remain largely unexplored. Using hyperscanning fNIRS, we examined musical pleasure friend dyads (N=34) who listened to favorite experimenter-selected either alone or together. Joint listening significantly increased pleasure, particularly for friend’s music, Pleasure Similarity (i.e., correlation continuous ratings within dyads). Musical was associated heightened activity prefrontal cortex, joint condition. In (vs solo) condition, Interpersonal Neural Synchrony (INS) greater, predicted by Similarity. These findings reveal first time dynamics emphasizing important role sharing modulating music-induced reward processing.