From Imagination to Immersion: The Impact of Augmented Reality Instruction on Musical Emotion Processing: An fNIRS Hyperscanning Study

<b>Background</b>: This study addresses a common challenge in music education: students’ limited emotional engagement during music listening. <b>Objectives</b>: This study compared two teaching methods—externally guided augmented reality (AR) integration and internally generated simulation—in terms of their neural and behavioral differences in guiding students’ visual mental imagery and influencing their musical affect processing. <b>Methods</b>: Using Chinese Pipa music appreciation as our experimental paradigm, we employed fNIRS hyperscanning to record inter-brain synchronization (IBS) during teacher–student interactions across three instructional conditions (AR group, <i>n</i> = 27; visual imagery group, <i>n</i> = 27; no-instruction group, <i>n</i> = 27), while simultaneously assessing students’ performance in music–emotion processing tasks (emotion recognition and experience). <b>Results</b>: At the behavioral level, both instructional methods significantly enhanced students’ ability to differentiate emotional valence in music compared to the control condition. Crucially, the AR approach demonstrated a unique advantage in augmenting emotional arousal. Neurally, both teaching methods significantly enhanced IBS in brain regions associated with emotion evaluation (lOFC) and imaginative reasoning (bilateral dlPFC). Beyond these shared neural correlates, AR instruction specifically engaged additional brain networks supporting social cognition (lFPC) and multisensory integration (rANG). Furthermore, we identified a significant positive correlation between lFPC-IBS and improved emotional arousal exclusively in the AR group. <b>Conclusions</b>: The visual imagery group primarily enhances emotional music processing through neural alignment in core emotional brain regions, while augmented reality instruction creates unique advantages by additionally activating brain networks associated with social cognition and cross-modal integration. This research provides neuroscientific evidence for the dissociable mechanisms through which different teaching approaches enhance music–emotion learning, offering important implications for developing evidence-based educational technologies.