An example is gait, where increased vertical movement while walking is found predictive of increased positive mood, and also distinguishes the gait of depressed patients from that of control subjects 12. In analogy to the reciprocal relationship of physiological activation and mental activation, there is also a reciprocity at the level of body movement and so-called body language. ANS activation is an example of the circular relationship between mind and body addressed by the embodiment perspective: mental arousal or relaxation has the consequence of bodily arousal or relaxation, whereas the reverse is also true, as the mind becomes alerted by sympathetic physiological activation or relaxed by parasympathetic activation. The ANS consists of two antagonistic branches, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic branch, which relate to arousal and relaxation, respectively. We therefore focused in the current study on measures of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) and on overt body movement. The strong coupling between emotional responses to music and physiological processes is also present in aesthetic experiences of ‘being moved’, which are often linked with physiological phenomena such as chills or tears 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. A large body of (mostly laboratory-based) research has shown that music regularly induces physiological responses in listeners 4, 5, 6. This approach has obvious consequences for the field of empirical aesthetics 3. The embodiment perspective deviates clearly from the traditional ‘cognitivistic’ understanding of cognition as information processing alone or predominantly. In the present application, we focused on ‘embodied’, which denotes that the mind is associated with body movement and physiology, on ‘embedded’ (the mind is nested in the affordances of the environment), and ‘enactive’ (the mind is involved in a continuous loop-like exchange between mental prediction and bodily sensory evidence). In this perspective, cognition is conceptualized as embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted (4E cognition) 1, 2. The embodiment of the mind plays an increasing role in cognitive science. Personality traits were also associated with the individual contributions to induction synchrony. There were links between the bodily synchrony and aesthetic experiences: synchrony, especially heart-rate synchrony, was higher when listeners felt moved emotionally and inspired by a piece, and were immersed in the music. Thus the audiences of the three concerts resonated with the music, their music perception was embodied. Clear evidence was found of physiological synchrony (heart rate, respiration rate, skin conductance response) as well as movement synchrony of the audiences, whereas breathing behavior was not synchronized. In addition to hypothesizing that such synchronies would be present, we expected that they were linked to participants’ aesthetic experiences, their affect and personality traits, which were assessed by questionnaires before and after the concerts. It was assumed that the music would induce synchronous physiology and movement in listeners (induction synchrony). A study of 132 audience members of three classical public concerts (all three staged the same chamber music pieces by Ludwig van Beethoven, Brett Dean, and Johannes Brahms) had the goal of analyzing the physiological and motor responses of audiences.
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