Interfaces between music, empathy and masculinities

• Grant number: 19/21398-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: February 01, 2020
• End date: December 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Music
• Principal Investigator: Graziela Bortz
• Grantee: Henrique Paulino da Silva
• Host Institution: Instituto de Artes (IA). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The way social interactions are related to the biological sex of humans has been increasingly questioned in recent years in the academy, and, when biological facts are analyzed as determinants of gender, literature is conflicting (UDRY, 1994). Much of scholar materials hold that biological sex, hormones, and physical development procedures in brain and body formation are responsible for determining an individual's gender, while research that emerges subtly in the early twentieth century suggests that the socio-cultural formation is more relevant to the meaning and development of a particular gender. Among all these aspects, current research, especially in the field of psychology, tends to show that women are more empathic than men, and this is not usually associated with the social construction of these individuals, but rather with biological sex (BARON-COHEN, 2009). This may continue to justify male behavior as inherent in man and independent of the social factors to which man has been exposed. However, a fact found in some studies in which music is used to measure empathy (GREENBERG et al., P. 13, 2015), even as a tool to induce a stimulus, is that there is no differentiation between the response of these stimuli between men and women, which points to disagreement with previous models. This study will seek to present an updated model on gender, empathy, and music according to literature. (AU)