Hearts Beating as One: Emotions and Physiology during Artistic Performance
In this collaborative project, we investigated how people infer the emotions of others, particularly looking at the role of empathic accuracy in creating a compelling artistic performance.
We designed a set of experiments that measured the physiology of actors and musicians while they simulated positive and negative emotions during a performance.
The emotional and physiological reactions of audience members were also recorded and compared to those of the performers to assess the emotional experiences of each group. The project team included Heather Harden (Department of Psychology), Elizabeth Necka (Department of Psychology), Patrick Fitzgibbon (Department of Music), and myself (Department of Music).
