Jatin Agarwala supervised by Dr. Vinoo Alluri received his Master of Science – Dual Degree  in Computer Science and Engineering (CSD). Here’s a summary of his research work on From Playlists to Posts: Exploring the Relationship Between Empathy and Music in Naturalistic Settings: 

Empathy, defined as the capacity to understand and share another’s emotional state, is a central construct in social and cognitive science. Prior research has repeatedly linked trait empathy to patterns of musical engagement. However, most evidence for empathy–music associations comes from controlled experiments or surveys, which raises questions about ecological validity. In this thesis, we validate and expand upon existing literature by studying voluntary, real-world behavior as they occur in actual music consumption patterns and online discourse surrounding music. The first study investigates the relationship between trait empathy and real-world music listening behavior at an individual level, using Spotify streaming histories and Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) scores from Indian university students. By analyzing one-year listening histories, this study identifies how empathic traits influence music preferences in terms of valence and arousal, and introduces a novel method for analyzing dynamic patterns using transitions in sequential music listening. The second study extends this inquiry to a social and linguistic level through Reddit discourse. It examines empathy at a group level, as expressed in music-related discussions across online communities, using natural language processing methods and large language models to estimate empathy in posts and comments. Combining large-scale computational analysis with qualitative interpretation, this study explores whether empathy-related patterns observed in the laboratory are reflected in everyday online conversations about music, and whether new patterns emerge in such contexts. Complementing these investigations, this thesis also introduces Muse-it, a research tool developed to simplify large-scale data collection and analysis. Designed with accessibility in mind, Muse-it reduces the technical barriers to studying online music discourse by allowing researchers to retrieve, analyze, and visualize large sets of posts and comments from Reddit, making big-data research in musicology and cognitive science more approachable. Together, these studies extend empathy and music research beyond the laboratory, contributing to a more ecologically grounded understanding of their relationship. They demonstrate how music-listening patterns related to empathy emerge not only in controlled experimental settings but also in the diverse naturalistic settings of social media and music streaming platforms. 

April 2026