According to Helen Riess, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, “Empathy plays a critical interpersonal and societal role, enabling sharing of experiences, needs, and desires between individuals and providing an emotional bridge that promotes pro-social behavior” (Riess). Based on how important empathy is to a society, one must wonder why this emotional experience is decreasing in human beings. Freelance writer Keith O’Brien wrote an article in 2010 that offers a staggering statistic from a study conducted at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, finding “that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years” (O’Brien). We need current studies to see if a decline continues or if there has been a shift that increased empathy in people.
Sara Konrath, PhD, an associate professor of philanthropic studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, is currently studying empathy as to reasons for its decline and how to increase empathy in people. Konrath shares the opinions of others doing research in this field that there is no one reason for the decline and no one way to fix it. She states in an interview with Kaitlin Luna of the American Psychological Association, “The first thing I would say is that we have to want to, it has to be important to us. The motivation really matters” (Konrath). Konrath’s study, along with studies by other scientific groups, realizes that young people today have challenges that earlier generations did not face. The culture and the world today make young people fearful for their safety and they are stressed out from living in a terrifying world. They are bombarded with negative information, and it desensitizes them, and they become numb to care what happens anymore, and that includes what happens to their fellow man. It is a more comfortable place to just not care anymore. Events like 9/11, the war in the Middle East, our rights being taken away by our own government, the worsening economy, and now the possibility of a war with Russia. It is too much to handle.
In a lot of cases, young people turn to music to cope and learn to deal with what’s going on, myself included. A study led by researchers at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found a “marked neurological difference between low-empathy and high-empathy people when listening to music” (Sharkey). I am a very emphatic person and think it is because of my lifelong love for music. Growing up I was seen as a rocker, emo, or punk for how I looked, and they are not wrong. I spent more time at Hot Topic when I was a kid than at any other store and spent my free time going to concerts. Places like Warped Tour and Hot Topic always had something with a phrase that has always stuck with me, “Music Is Life.” When I was young, I always thought about it how no matter what we were going through, there was some song that can relate to how a person is feeling. Not too long after taking this class though, I started to realize this was called empathy.
An experiment conducted by Z. Wallmark, Southern Methodist University, and M. Iacoboni, the University of California with collaboration from C. Deblieckm, University Psychiatric Center, Belgium, showed that “people who are highly empathic process music differently in their brains…music has some special power to increase our sense of connection and help us affiliate with others” (Suttie). These results were based on MRI tests of participating subjects.
Often the songs an artist writes and sings come from an experience in their own lives and the listener feels that the words express how they feel and that someone has been where they are now. One of the biggest bands I can think of who excelled in this is Linkin Park. In 2019 a woman from Orlando, Florida “helped dissuade a man from taking his own life after she quoted him lyrics from the Linkin Park song ‘One More Light” (Ramli). Music fundamentally has a way to connect people. To help someone understand another or to just make someone feel like they are not alone.
These songs were not necessarily telling us how to handle what we were going through but often told us our feelings mattered. Music can show us that we are not alone and help us through our issues as a lot of people do not have someone to turn to for help. Therefore, at concerts most of the people attending get along well and have a good time together. We all share the same feelings about the music and message being presented to us. I have met some of the best people I know at concerts and been involved in instances where a group of us would help a fellow fan in need. Rule #1 of the mosh pit, if someone falls, you pick them up.