Joint music listening enhances interpersonal affective and neural synchrony

Music is one of the most pleasurable stimuli in humans' life, often experienced in social contexts where shared enjoyment can amplify emotional responses. Despite its significance, the neural and affective mechanisms underlying socially shared music remain largely unexplored. Using hyperscanning fNIRS, we examined shared musical pleasure in friend dyads (N = 34) who listened to favorite and experimenter-selected music either alone or together. Joint listening did not increase pleasure in general, but slightly enhanced pleasure for friend's music and increased Pleasure Similarity, defined as the correlation of continuous pleasure ratings within dyads. Musical pleasure was associated to heightened activity in the prefrontal cortex, particularly in the joint condition. In the joint (vs solo) condition, Interpersonal Neural Synchrony (INS) was greater, and significantly predicted by Pleasure Similarity. These findings reveal the neural dynamics of shared musical pleasure, emphasizing the important role of social sharing in modulating music-induced reward processing.