“Music listening is enjoyed across the lifespan and around the world. This has spurred many theories on the evolutionary purpose of music. The Music for Social Bonding hypothesis posits that the human capacity to make music evolved for the purpose of creating and preserving relationships between one another. … we propose that neurocognitive changes in the reward system make adolescence an ideal developmental time window for investigating interactions between prosocial behavior and reward processing, as adolescence constitutes a time of relative increase in music reward valuation.”

Find the paper and full list of authors in Frontiers in Psychology.