Solitary Silence and Social Sounds: Music influences mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions

The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation 1 . During these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’ 2 ; indicating that they may have turned to music for social solace 3 . However, whether this is simply a figure of speech or an empirically observable effect on social thought was previously unclear. In three experiments, six hundred participants were presented with silence or task-irrelevant music in Italian, Spanish, or Swedish while performing a directed mental-imagery task in which they imagined a journey towards a topographical landmark 4 . To control for a possible effect of vocals on imagined content, the music was presented with or without vocals to the participants, of which half were native speakers and the other half non-speakers of the respective languages. Music, compared to silence, led to more vivid imagination and changes in imagined content. Specifically, social interaction emerged as a clear thematic cluster in participants’ descriptions of their imagined content through Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Moreover, Bayesian Mixed effects models revealed that music significantly increased imagined social content compared to silence conditions. This effect remained robust irrespective of vocals or language comprehension. Using stable diffusion, we generated visualisations of participants’ imagined content. In a fourth experiment, a new group of participants was able to use these visualisations to differentiate between content imagined during music listening and that of the silence condition, but only when listening to the associated music. Results converge to show that music, indeed, can be good company.