A dataset for researching the relationship between musicality, empathy and other social cognitive abilities

In this experiment, participants were exposed to a series of pain stimulation videos, with a total of three types of pain stimuli: needle pricking with expression, needle pricking with no expression, cotton swab pricking with no expression. The condition of cotton swab pricking with no expression was used as the control condition in the experiment and was not included in the final analysis. Using 3 protagonists and the direction of the needle/cotton swab (left/right), create 12 stimuli for each type, totaling 36 stimulus materials, with the stimuli presented in a random order.

Each trial presents a stimulus material and presents it twice. The participants need to evaluate the pain level of the characters in the material from the perspectives of others/themselves. Specifically, the question before the first playback is "How much pain do you feel for the protagonist in the video?", and the question before the second playback is "To what extent do you feel pain?”, All patients received a 6-point rating of 1 (completely painless) to 6 (very painful).

Record the participants' scores on 2 questions for each trial. In terms of experimental data processing, it is necessary to calculate the average scores of the three stimulus types under the two evaluation perspectives of the subjects, that is, each subject will receive six scores based on the conditions. Furthermore, the Empathy, Music sophistication, Anxiety, Depression, Alexithymia, Subjective social status were collected as the experiment 1.

In addition, we collect the objective musicality of participants.Objective musicality: Musical Ear Test (MET)(Wallentin et al, 2010). In both experiments, we additionally collected the age, gender of each participant and classified them into two groups of musicians and non-musicians due to whether they have ever received music training for more than 10 years. All the participants are high school students from different grades.music & empathy dataset. xlsxSheet “experiment 1” has 251 data in total.

Sheet “experiment 2” has 120 data in total.Empathy: IRI_PT (Perspective Taking), IRI_FS (Fantasy), IRI_EC (Emotional concern), IRI_PD (Personal distress).Music sophistication: GMSI_AE (Active Engagement),       GMSI_PA (Perceptual Abilities), GMSI_MT (Musical Training), GMSI_SA (Singing Abilities), GMSI_E (Emotions), GMS (General Music Sophistication).The big five personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.Anxiety: STAI-S (state anxiety), STAI-T (trait anxiety)Depression: BDI.Alexithymia: TAS-f1 (Difficulty identifying feelings (DIF)), TAS-f2 (Difficulty describing feelings (DDF)), TAS-f3 (Externally oriented thinking (EOT)), TAS-20Subjective social status: SSS, the 7 Chinese lines before the line “SSS”.Objective musicality: MET-melody, MET-rhythm. raw_experiment1. xlsxThis file show the raw data of experiment 1, it presents the scoring of every items in all inventories of each participants.

The red letter indicates reverse scoring and has already undergone reverse scoring operations, The highlighted yellow part represents the total score of the scale or the subscale and these areas retain the Excel formula for calculating scores. raw_experiment2. rarThis file shows the raw data of experiment 2, The folder “musician physical pain” contains the raw mat files which recorded all experiment response of each musician.

The folder “nonmusician physical pain” contains the raw mat files which recorded all experiment response of each non-musician. In each mat file, you can get all response and response time in “Output” and get the stimuli number in “LIST_pain”. The first 2 line of “Output” is the response in perspective of other, and the last 2 line is the response in perspective of self.

The excel file show the all responses made in experiment by each participant, it is compiled from the 2 folders mentioned above, the number in line “trial” is consistent with the number in “LIST_pain”. The last 2 line show the detail of stimuli in that trial, “1” means yes, “0” means no. In the line “musician”, “1” means musicians, “0” means non-musicians.