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Description: The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation (Martín, Ortega-Sánchez, Miguel, & Martín, 2021). Reasons for this are likely varied but it is noteworthy that in many cultures, music is rooted in traditions of social interactions (Clayton, 2009), and listeners may have turned to music for social solace (Fink et al., 2021). Indeed, during these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’ (Cabedo-Mas, Arriaga-Sanz, & Moliner-Miravet, 2021); 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 (Herff, Cecchetti, Taruffi, & Déguernel, 2021). To control for possible effect of lyrics on imagined content, the music was presented with or without lyrics to the participants, of which half were native speakers and the other half non-speakers of the respective languages. Music, compared to silence, let to more vivid imagination and changes in imagined content. Through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a clear thematic cluster related to social interaction emerged in participants’ descriptions of their imagined content. Using Bayesian Mixed effects models, we observed a significant increase of this social theme in trials containing music, which remained robust across the three experiments, irrespective of lyrics or language comprehension. We then used stable diffusion to generate visualisations of participants’ imagined content. In a fourth experiments, a new group of participants was able to differentiate visualisations of content imagined during music listening from that of the silence condition, but only when listening to the associated music. Results converge to show that music, indeed, can be good company.

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