Abstract
Coordinating actions with others during activities such as group music-making has fascinating implications for people’s sense of agency. The sense of agency refers to feelings of control over actions and their consequences. Each person engaged in group music-making can have a sense of agency at an individual level (a sense that “I am playing my part” or “You are playing your part”) and also at a collective level (a sense that “We are playing the piece together”). The latter is referred to as joint agency, and can range from a sense that agency is shared among co-performers to a powerful sense that co-performers are “acting as one”. In this talk, I will present a series of studies that used a multi-methods approach to investigate joint agency in group music-making contexts. These studies include experimental investigations of the behavioural and EEG correlates of joint agency in duet music performance as well as qualitative investigations of joint agency across a variety of group music-making settings. Our findings shed light on the musical features that elicit different forms of joint agency, the phenomenology of joint agency, and links between joint agency and markers of well-being such as social bonding among group members, motivation, and sense of meaning.
Bio
Janeen Loehr is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Health Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Her research investigates cognitive and neural mechanisms of interpersonal coordination, their impact on individuals’ and groups’ sense of agency, and how strong experiences of group agency contribute to health and well-being. She addresses these questions primarily in music-making contexts and uses a multi-methods approach that includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. She leads the University of Saskatchewan’s EEG Hyperscanning Laboratory and is a founding member of the interdisciplinary PICASSO (Promoting Interpersonal Connection and Alignment for Self and Society) research cluster, whose mission is to investigate how basic mechanisms of interpersonal coordination can be leveraged to address complex health and social challenges.