Musical emotion is an emotional response induced by musical stimulation. Music emotion recognition is a process in which individuals evaluate the emotions contained in or intended to be expressed in music. The ability to recognize musical emotions is one manifestation of the development of social cognition, which is also the premise of music appreciation and the basis of emotional regulation by music. If the emotional recognition ability of music is impaired, the aesthetic, spiritual, and practical values will be reduced, and the individual's emotional understanding and communication will also be affected. Therefore, the factors related to music emotion recognition and how to improve the ability of individual music emotion recognition have become a concern for researchers in music psychology. The study found that personality's "empathy" trait may be related to recognizing musical emotions. Empathy is the ability to perceive and experience other people's emotional states accurately. Individuals with strong empathy are more susceptible to emotional infections and are more sensitive to emotions. Thus, from the perspective of musical psychological localization, this study investigated the possible influence of empathy differences on emotion recognition in Chinese national music. The hypotheses were as follows: first, in the emotional judgment stage, compared with the low empathy group, the high empathy group is more accurate in the recognition of musical emotion, easier to judge the consistency and inconsistency, and the amplitude of the P2 and N400 components are smaller. Second, in the stage of emotional meaning integration, the high empathy group processes the musical emotion more deeply and invests more attention resources, and the amplitude of the late positive component ( LPC) is larger. The cross-channel emotion-priming paradigm was used to study individuals with high and low empathy. The G*Power 3.1.9.2 software was used to calculate the required sample size to achieve sufficient statistical power. The study had a mixed design, with a median effect (f = 0.25) and a significance level a = 0.05, requiring at least 12 participants per class to achieve an 80% statistical power level. In the early stages of the experiment, the Chinese revised Interpersonal Reactivity Index ( IRI-C) was distributed online to recruit college students. Based on responses to 522 questionnaires, 72 college students with high and low empathy levels were chosen to participate in the electroencephalogram experiment. Before the experiment, all participants completed a basic information statistics form and signed an informed consent form. After the experiment, they were given course credit and experimental remuneration. The behavioral results showed no significant difference in the response time and accuracy of emotion recognition between the high and low empathy groups. However, the response time of the high-empathy group was slightly lower than that of the low-empathy group, and the accuracy rate of the high-empathy group was higher than that of the low-empathy group under the emotional consistency condition for Gong-tone music. Contrastingly, there was no difference between the low-empathy groups under the two conditions. The event-related potential results showed that P2, N400, and LPC components were induced in the middle and late stages of Chinese national music emotion recognition. The amplitudes of P2 and N400 in the low-empathy group were more significant than those in the high-empathy group, and the amplitude of the LPC in the high-empathy group was more extensive than that in the low-empathy group. According to our findings, in the emotion recognition process in Chinese national music, the high-and low-empathy groups showed differences in some electroencephalogram components. This shows that event-related potential technology can explore the differences between the two groups of participants in the time course of music emotion recognition. This study found three main components related to recognizing musical emotions: P2, N400, and LPC. P2 is an indicator of perceptual analysis of musical and emotional stimuli, N400 is more sensitive to the inconsistent effect of musical emotion, and LPC is an indicator of the later evaluation of the emotional significance of musical stimuli. The attentional involvement of high-and low-empathy groups in different stages of Chinese national music emotion recognition may affect the depth of processing emotional stimuli and music emotion recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the difference in neural responses of individuals with different levels of empathy in emotion recognition of Chinese national music from the electrophysiological level, which has important exploratory significance.
