The role of musical aesthetic emotions in social adaptation to the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT The Covid-19 pandemic is confronting us with an unprecedented challenging distressing situation. This unexpected threat required us, individually, to reconfigure our social life and, socially, to shift collective goals toward cure and health community. Therefore, the ability to adaptively face such changes is of vital importance. However, individuals, organizations and political leaders have shown a resistance to adjust individual, group and social policies to the ongoing changes. Commentators suggested that “cognitive dissonance” might be the self-justifying mechanism underlying the inability to change and accept the novel cognitive and emotional schemata brought by the pandemic. Hence, reducing cognitive dissonance may result in a stronger adaptive outcome. Interestingly, recent developments in neuroaesthetic research suggest that music evolved as a social tool to face and reduce cognitive dissonance. The pleasant aesthetic emotions elicited by listening to music might contribute at an individual and social level to embrace conflicting knowledge, thus enhancing our ability to tolerate transient states of uncertainty without reacting impulsively. This hypothesized relation between aesthetic emotions and knowledge acquisition is coherent with a centuries-old philosophical debate on the role of aesthetic emotions as well as with recent neurocomputational models of neuroaesthetics and learning. Here we review the main theories and the more recent neuroimaging findings supporting the role of aesthetic emotion on knowledge acquisition. We speculate that music might act as a social ‘vaccine’ against conservative behaviours tending to deny or oversimplify unpredicted events and promote adaptive social change/learning.