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Functional MRI study of happy and sad – affective states induced by classical music
Human Brain Mapping
Abstract
The present study investigated the functional neuroanatomy of transient mood changes in response to Western classical music. In a pilot experiment, 53 healthy volunteers (mean age: 32.0; SD = 9.6) evaluated their emotional responses to 60 classical musical pieces using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (sad) through 50 (neutral) to 100 (happy). Twenty pieces were found to accurately induce the intended emotional states with good reliability, consisting of 5 happy, 5 sad, and 10 emotionally unevocative, neutral musical pieces. In a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal contrast was measured in response to the mood state induced by each musical stimulus in a separate group of 16 healthy participants (mean age: 29.5; SD = 5.5). Mood state ratings during scanning were made by a VAS, which confirmed the emotional valence of the selected stimuli. Increased BOLD signal contrast during presentation of happy music was found in the ventral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus, and auditory association areas. With sad music, increased BOLD signal responses were noted in the hippocampus/amygdala and auditory association areas. Presentation of neutral music was associated with increased BOLD signal responses in the insula and auditory association areas. Our findings suggest that an emotion processing network in response to music integrates the ventral and dorsal striatum, areas involved in reward experience and movement; the anterior cingulate, which is important for targeting attention; and medial temporal areas, traditionally found in the appraisal and processing of emotions.
... fMRI studies have also shown that compared to neutral composition, happy music activates several brain regions such as the superior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and precuneus (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), while sad music activates brain regions such as the hippocampus/amygdala, posterior cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and cerebellum (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). However, there is need to investigate brain activity particularly during basic primary emotion of happiness and sadness evoked by music using EEG especially in connection to cognitive and emotion processing. ...
... fMRI studies have also shown that compared to neutral composition, happy music activates several brain regions such as the superior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and precuneus (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), while sad music activates brain regions such as the hippocampus/amygdala, posterior cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and cerebellum (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). However, there is need to investigate brain activity particularly during basic primary emotion of happiness and sadness evoked by music using EEG especially in connection to cognitive and emotion processing. ...
... Consistent findings indicate that compared to unpleasant music, pleasant music activates specific regions, including the subcallosal cingulate, inferior frontal gyrus, anterior insula, parietal operculum, and ventral striatum. Conversely, the unpleasant scrambled condition shows heightened activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal poles (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Blood et al., 1999;Trost et al., 2012). However, . ...
EEG microstates offer a unique window into the dynamics of emotional experiences. This study delved into the emotional responses of happiness and sadness triggered by music videos, employing microstate analysis and eLoreta source-level investigation in the alpha band. The results of the microstate analysis showed that regardless of gender, participants during happy music video significantly upregulated class D microstate and downregulated class C microstate, leading to a significantly enhanced global explained variance (GEV), coverage, occurrence, duration, and global field power (GFP) for class D. Conversely, sad music video had the opposite effect. The eLoreta study revealed that during the happy state, there was enhanced CSD in the central parietal regions across both genders and diminished functional connectivity in the precuneus for female participants compared to the sad state. Class D and class C microstates are linked to attention and mind-wandering, respectively. The findings suggest that (1) increased class D and CSD activity could explain heightened attentiveness observed during happy music, and (2) increased class C activity and functional connectivity could explain enhanced mind wandering observed during sad music. Additionally, female participants exhibited significantly higher mean occurrence than males, and the sad state showed significantly higher mean occurrence than the happy state.
... Subjective well-being, broadly defined, has been linked to widespread regions throughout the brain (de Vries et al., 2023). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of happiness induction have reported increased activity in frontal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), parietal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), temporal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), and cingulate (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007) regions, as well as subcortical regions such as the amygdala (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005). In these studies, happiness was induced by asking participants to view faces depicting specific emotions (Habel et al., 2005), listen to emotional music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), or imagine emotional life events (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016). ...
... Subjective well-being, broadly defined, has been linked to widespread regions throughout the brain (de Vries et al., 2023). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of happiness induction have reported increased activity in frontal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), parietal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), temporal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), and cingulate (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007) regions, as well as subcortical regions such as the amygdala (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005). In these studies, happiness was induced by asking participants to view faces depicting specific emotions (Habel et al., 2005), listen to emotional music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), or imagine emotional life events (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016). ...
... Subjective well-being, broadly defined, has been linked to widespread regions throughout the brain (de Vries et al., 2023). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of happiness induction have reported increased activity in frontal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), parietal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), temporal (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), and cingulate (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007) regions, as well as subcortical regions such as the amygdala (Costa et al., 2019;Habel et al., 2005). In these studies, happiness was induced by asking participants to view faces depicting specific emotions (Habel et al., 2005), listen to emotional music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007), or imagine emotional life events (Costa et al., 2019;Matsunaga et al., 2016). ...
Objectives
Happiness has been shown to influence many health-related outcomes in older adults. Identifying correlates and brain substrates of happiness across countries and cultures is an important goal, as the global older adult population continues to increase.
Methods
We used univariate and multiple regression to examine associations between happiness and several demographic, health, and lifestyle variables in 665 older adults (39% female) from Kerala, India. We also used Bayesian regression to examine associations between cortical thickness and happiness in a subsample of 188 participants that completed MRI scanning.
Results
Happiness was significantly associated with several variables. In our multiple regression model, which included all significant univariate predictors, self-rated health, depression, anxiety, apathy, social network size, social network diversity, and social support significantly predicted happiness. Demographic indicators (age, sex, education, marital status, residence, and employment status/type), cognitive impairment, comorbidities, and leisure activities were not significantly associated with happiness in the multiple regression model. Cortical thickness in several brain regions was positively associated with happiness scores, including frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital, and cingulate regions.
Discussion
Understanding the key correlates is critical for identifying both modifiable factors that can be targeted in well-being interventions and fixed characteristics that identify those at-risk for reduced happiness. The widespread pattern of brain regions associated with happiness is consistent with the multifactorial nature of happiness and, given that the regions identified do not overlap with those vulnerable to cortical thinning, can help explain why subjective well-being, unlike other cognitive functions, is largely resistant to age-related decline.
... The nucleus accumbens has been reported to be involved in positive valence emotions, while the amygdala, insula, and postcentral gyrus have been shown to play a role in negative valence emotions (Goshvarpour & Goshvarpour, 2019). Brain regions such as the superior frontal gyrus, ACC, posterior cingulate gyrus, nucleus caudate, ventral striatum, parahippocampal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and precuneus show activation during the listening of positive valence music compared to neutral music (Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, 2007). On the other hand, brain regions including the hippocampus/amygdala, posterior cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and cerebellum are activated during exposure to negative valence music compared to neutral music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). ...
... Brain regions such as the superior frontal gyrus, ACC, posterior cingulate gyrus, nucleus caudate, ventral striatum, parahippocampal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and precuneus show activation during the listening of positive valence music compared to neutral music (Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, 2007). On the other hand, brain regions including the hippocampus/amygdala, posterior cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and cerebellum are activated during exposure to negative valence music compared to neutral music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). When contrasting negative valence music with positive valence music, there is significantly enhanced activation in the left medial frontal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus, while activation is reduced in the left superior temporal gyrus (Brattico et al., 2011;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Khalfa, Schon, Anton, & Liégeois-Chauvel, 2005). ...
... On the other hand, brain regions including the hippocampus/amygdala, posterior cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and cerebellum are activated during exposure to negative valence music compared to neutral music (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). When contrasting negative valence music with positive valence music, there is significantly enhanced activation in the left medial frontal gyrus and superior frontal gyrus, while activation is reduced in the left superior temporal gyrus (Brattico et al., 2011;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Khalfa, Schon, Anton, & Liégeois-Chauvel, 2005). ...
Humans have distinct experiences with the primary emotions of happiness and sadness, with significant gender difference in emotional processing. Happy music notably increases meta-awareness, while sad music leads to an increase in mind wandering. Additionally, females exhibit a higher degree of perception, intensity, frequency, and reactivity in response to processing emotional stimuli, whereas males demonstrate greater efficiency in emotion regulation. However, there is limited research that examines the contrast between these discrete emotions while considering gender differences through EEG. We conducted EEG source-level analysis of male and female brains in the alpha band while they listened to happy and sad music. Results show that, regardless of stimuli, females have significantly enhanced mean brain activation than males, while males have relatively enhanced mean brain functional connectivity. Additionally, regions such as the cingulate gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, and superior frontal gyrus are more prominently activated in females. Females also have enhanced brain connectivity during sad music listening than happy music, while males have enhanced brain activity during happy music listening compared to sad music. Neural response to happy and sad musical stimuli by female and male participants reveal distinct brain activations, thus supporting distinct experiences underpinning them.
... Among the significant results were the marked divergences in activation between minor and minor chords in brain centers involved in emotion, such as the amygdala, areas of the brainstem and retrosplenial cortex. A couple of years later, (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007) confirmed these results, with significant involvement in the brain network involved in the process of emotions when listening to happy or sad music, such as the anterior cingulate and medial temporal areas. The major mode significantly activates the ventral striatum, a dopaminergic center typically responsible for gratification, while the minor tone mainly activates the hippocampalamygdala area. ...
... However, even though an explanation cannot be provided, various neuroscientific evidence seems to confirm a regular pairing between major chords with positive emotions, and minor chords with negative emotions, starting from the already cited work by Pallesen et al. (2005), and that by (Mitterschiffthaler et al. 2007), to which additional confirmations are added. ...
Various music enthusiasts can testify from personal experience to the powerful impact of listening to sad music, and several experimental studies have confirmed the widespread preference for this musical genre. Sadness is a negative emotion, and if someone seeks it out in real life, they are considered to be suffering from some psychological disorder. So why is the avid listener of sad music not usually a psychopath? This study attempts a reconnaissance of the various hypotheses that have been put forward, and the ensuing discussions, about the paradox of enjoying sadness in music. Ending with the observation that we are still far from a convincing explanation.
... To assess the spatio-spectral EEG correlates of emotional intent upon the explored day-reproducible ICs, a short-time Fourier transform with a 50% overlapped 2-s Hamming window was applied to calculate the logarithmic power spectra of each of the derived ICs in five frequency bands: delta (1 -3 Hz), theta (4 -7 Hz), alpha (8 -13 Hz), beta (14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30), and gamma (31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49)(50). For a trial segment, the preceding 30-sec mechanical play period was treated as a baseline to normalize the 30-sec emotional play segment; that is, subtracting the baseline mean power and dividing by its standard deviation. ...
... However, most of them projected high-frequency spectral modulations in the beta and gamma bands over the neighboring brain regions of interest, while our findings exhibited a noticeable frontal vs. parietal distinction; that is, the frontal area tended to reflect the beta and gamma modulations and the parietal area was associated with the alpha alteration. Even though the spectral disparity may be attributed to different experimental tasks (stationary music-listening vs. active piano-playing), the consensus between the studies by means of the ICA-driven, multiple-day analytical scenario facilitated a better understanding of the role of the frontal cortex (e.g., DLPFC (BA9), ACC (BA 24, 32, and 33) [8,[38][39][40][41]) in intervening in emotional processes and expressing spectral signatures that are relatively resistant to ecological intra-and inter-individual EEG variability. Additionally, our cross-day findings and existing single-day outcomes regarding emotional responses may support or complement each other, e.g., posterior alpha relevant to emotional affect and intensity [35,42,43] and prefrontal beta and gamma asymmetry in valence [44]. ...
Imbuing emotional intent serves as a crucial modulator of music improvisation during active musical instrument playing. However, most improvisation-related neural endeavors have been gained without considering the emotional context. This study attempted to exploit reproducible spatio-spectral electroencephalogram (EEG) oscillations of emotional intent using a data-driven independent component analysis framework in an ecological multiday piano playing experiment. Through the four-day 32-ch EEG dataset of 10 professional players, we showed that EEG patterns were substantially affected by both intra- and inter-individual variability underlying the emotional intent of the dichotomized valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low) categories. Less than half (3–4) of the 10 participants analogously exhibited day-reproducible (≥ three days) spectral modulations at the right frontal beta in response to the valence contrast as well as the frontal central gamma and the superior parietal alpha to the arousal counterpart. In particular, frontal engagement facilitated a better understanding of the frontal cortex (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) and its role in intervening emotional processes and expressing spectral signatures that are relatively resistant to natural EEG variability. Such ecologically vivid EEG findings may lead to better understanding of the development of a brain-computer music interface infrastructure capable of guiding the training, performance, and appreciation for emotional improvisatory status or actuating music interaction via emotional context.
... However, music that sounds characteristically sad (e.g., minor mode, slower tempo, dissonant harmonies) was found to be processed differently than music which sounds characteristically joyful (e.g., major mode, faster tempo, consonant harmonies; Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Västfjäll, 2001). Listening to sad music prompts individuals to be more interoceptive, causing them to dwell on internal feelings and personal associations (Herdson et al., 2022), autobiographical memories, and visualization thereof (Janata, 2009;Völker, 2022;Vroegh, 2021). ...
The perceptual and cognitive underpinnings of emotional responses to music listening are subject to ongoing debate. Here, we investigated three different frameworks, namely spreading activation theory, emotional processing mechanisms (i.e., the components of the BRECVEMA model), and flow theory (i.e., fluency and absorption) in an online music listening experiment. A total of N = 99 participants were recruited to take part in a breathing meditation while listening to music of four target categories (familiar/joyful, familiar/sad, unfamiliar/joyful, unfamiliar/sad). Each participant rated their experiences by means of questionnaires. We assumed that listeners' familiarity with the music would be associated with greater emotionality and flow, and that emotion categories evoked differential patterns of responses. Additionally, we explored the associations of variables representing the three frameworks in a network analysis. We found that familiar music evoked stronger activation and emotional mechanisms, but not stronger flow. There were no differences between sad and joyful music, implying that different models may be needed to capture the elicited and perceived expressive aspects of musical materials. The findings suggest that the three models tap into partially overlapping facets of emotional experience in music listening, in which evaluations of liking, aesthetics, musical expectancies, and autotelic experiences play central roles.
... The PG, located in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), is closely associated with a variety of higher cognitive functions. Although traditionally considered to be more responsive to visual stimuli, research has shown that the PG also responds to auditory stimuli (Mitterschiffthaler et al. 2007;Arnott et al. 2008;Engelien et al. 2006). Specifically, the PG is closely connected to the auditory cortex, playing a significant role in the encoding and retrieval of auditory memory (Baumann and Mattingley 2016;Aminoff et al. 2013;Pearson et al. 2011). ...
The brain represents information through the encoding of neural populations, where the activity patterns of these neural groups constitute the content of this information. Understanding these activity patterns and their dynamic changes is of significant importance to cognitive neuroscience and related research areas. Current studies focus more on brain regions that show differential responses to stimuli, but they lack the ability to capture information about the representational or process‐level dynamics within these regions. In this study, we recorded neural data from 10 healthy participants during auditory experiments using optically pumped magnetometer magnetoencephalography (OPM‐MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG). We constructed representational similarity matrices (RSMs) to investigate the similarity of neural response patterns during auditory decoding. The results indicate that RSA can reveal the dynamic changes in pattern similarity during different stages of auditory processing through the neural activity patterns reflected by OPM‐MEG. Comparisons with EEG results showed that both techniques captured the same processes during the early stages of auditory decoding. However, differences in sensitivity at later stages highlighted both common and distinct aspects of neural representation between the two modalities. Further analysis indicated that this process involved widespread neural network activation, including the Heschl's gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, and orbitofrontal gyrus. This study demonstrates that the combination of OPM‐MEG and RSA is sufficiently sensitive to detect changes in pattern similarity during neural representation processes and to identify their anatomical origins, offering new insights and references for the future application of RSA and other multivariate pattern analysis methods in the MEG field.
... Therefore, this study used an intra-group comparison, that is, comparing the ankle joint position sense performance of the same participants under different emotional conditions elicited by listening to selected pieces of classical music. We chose classical music as a listening stimulus to trigger happy, sad and neutral emotional states because the same pool of classical music pieces have been shown to activate the corresponding emotional cortex in the brain 24 . ...
Human movement is influenced by emotions, yet their effect on proprioceptive behavior remains unclear. This study examined how emotions impact ankle joint proprioception during ipsilateral and contralateral target-matching tasks. Twenty participants performed ankle matching tasks under four conditions: no music, happy, sad, and neutral. Emotional states were assessed using a visual analog scale, and angle errors were recorded. On the dominant side, absolute errors during ipsilateral tasks were significantly smaller under sad emotion compared to no music (p = 0.029, d = − 0.48) and neutral conditions (p = 0.029, d = − 0.48). Conversely, errors increased under happy emotion compared to no music (p = 0.006, d = 0.91) and neutral (p = 0.01, d = 0.77). For the non-dominant side, sadness reduced variable errors in contralateral tasks (sad < no music, p = 0.020, d = − 0.87; sad < neutral, p = 0.020, d = − 0.56; sad < happy, p < 0.001, d = − 1.36). Overall, sadness improved JPS performance, stabilizing errors, while happiness generally impaired it. These findings suggest that emotional states distinctly influence proprioceptive accuracy and stability, offering new insights into the interplay between emotion and movement.
... object itself (Davies, 1994(Davies, , 2001Hatten, 2018;Kivy, 1980Kivy, , 1990. Most of the neurocognitive literature on music and emotion has focused on the induction of emotions in response to music listening, such as the elicitation of aesthetic responses (Blood et al., 1999;Blood & Zatorre, 2001;Konečni, 2008) or the evocation of basic emotions like happiness and fear (Koelsch, 2020;Koelsch et al., 2013;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). By contrast, the study of the emotions conveyed by music itself has received far less attention in the neuromusic literature, despite its central importance to music as a communication system. ...
Objective: The great mystery of music is the unique manner in which it is able to convey emotion. Its most domain-specific mechanism for doing so is tonality, most notably scale structure. Music’s tonal structure creates a “language of emotion” whereby different scale types connote differences in emotional interpretation. In order to explore the neural basis of music’s language of emotion, we carried out a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Method: Trained musicians (n = 31) were tasked with discriminating the musical scale used in melodic samples, as well as the emotion conveyed by these samples, where the samples differed in the scale used (either major, minor, or chromatic). This was compared with a speech prosody condition in which participants had to discriminate the emotion conveyed in spoken utterances. Results: This comparison revealed the importance of regions that are little described in the neuromusic literature, namely, the lateral frontopolar cortex (Brodmann area 10/46) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (area 32/8). Conclusions: The lateral frontopolar cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex contribute to the perception of emotional meaning in music, as conveyed through scale structure.
... The hippocampus was also found to be active during emotions induced by music, and especially while listening to pleasant music. The role of the hippocampus in emotional processing has been met with mixed findings in the literature, with studies showing activations while listening to unpleasant music ( Koelsch et al., 2006;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007) and pleasant music ( Koelsch et al., 2010;Trost et al., 2012). The hippocampus does contribute to the processing of emotions ( Koelsch, 2014( Koelsch, , 2020, which is in line with the findings from the current study. ...
Prior neuroimaging studies of music-evoked emotions have shown that music listening involves the activation of both cortical and subcortical regions. However, these regions could be differentially activated by music stimuli with varying affective valence and arousal. To better understand the neural correlates involved in the processing of pleasant and unpleasant emotions induced by music, while also considering the effect of arousal, we conducted a quantitative activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis. We performed separate ALE analyses for the overall brain activation evoked by listening to emotional music (40 studies), for the brain activation during listening to unpleasant music (15 studies), for the brain activation while listening to pleasant music (17 studies), and for the brain activation while listening to emotional contrasted with neutral music (8 studies). Our results revealed the activation of a range of cortical and subcortical regions, including the amygdala, insula, striatum, thalamus, hippocampus, anterior cingulate gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Moreover, our findings indicated that certain regions were specifically activated based on the hedonic valence and arousal of the stimuli. Particularly, whereas the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsal striatum, and thalamus were dependent on arousal effects, amygdala activation was dependent on hedonic valence. The identification of brain networks preferentially activated during listening to pleasant and unpleasant music provides valuable clinical insights for the development of therapies targeting psychological disorders associated with emotion reactivity problems.
... For the audio stimuli, pieces of classical music were chosen known to elicit happy, sad, and emotionally neutral states as reported by [11]. See Tables 2 and 3 for selected clips. ...
This study investigates the use of accelerometer data from a smart watch to infer an individual's emotional state. We present our preliminary findings on a user study with 50 participants. Participants were primed either with audio-visual (movie clips) or audio (classical music) to elicit emotional responses. Participants then walked while wearing a smart watch on one wrist and a heart rate strap on their chest. Our hypothesis is that the accelerometer signal will exhibit different patterns for participants in response to different emotion priming. We divided the accelerometer data using sliding windows, extracted features from each window, and used the features to train supervised machine learning algorithms to infer an individual's emotion from their walking pattern. Our discussion includes a description of the methodology, data collected, and early results.
... In addition to the fundamental differences between the neuroimaging methods described, the discrepancies in literature might be ascribed to the overlapping of some of the neural correlates related to happiness and sadness perceived in music [59,96,115]. Brain structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, and regions of the reward circuit are involved in both pleasantness and unpleasantness perception in music [19,64,116]. ...
... In contrast, music often serves social functions and fulfills basic human needs, thereby activating the phylogenetically older reward system (Koelsch, 2014). Our findings align with previous research showing that music appreciation engages the mesolimbic reward pathway, particularly the VS (Blood and Zatorre, 2001;Koelsch et al., 2018;Martínez-Molina et al., 2016;Menon and Levitin, 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Salimpoor et al., 2013). ...
Aesthetic experiences are characterized by a conscious, emotionally and hedonically rewarding perceptions of a stimulus's aesthetic qualities and are thought to arise from a unique combination of cognitive and affective processes. To pinpoint neural correlates of aesthetic experiences, in the present study, we performed a series of meta-analyses based on the existing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies of art appreciation in visual art (34 experiments, 692 participants) and music (34 experiments, 718 participants). The Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses showed that the frontal pole (FP), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) were commonly activated in visual-art-induced aesthetic experiences, whilst bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) and striatal areas were commonly activated in music appreciation. Additionally, task-independent Resting-state Functional Connectivity (RSFC), task-dependent Meta-analytical Connectivity Modelling (MACM) analyses, as well as Activation Network Modeling (ANM) further showed that visual art and music engaged quite distinct brain networks. Our findings support the domain-specific view of aesthetic appreciation and challenge the notion that there is a general “common neural currency” for aesthetic experiences across domains.
... During the fMRI acquisition, all participants were required to listen to 13 pieces of classical music and asked to continuously rate how each piece of music made them feel on a scale of − 6 (very sad) to + 6 (very happy). These pieces of music were chosen as they have previously been identified as eliciting happy, neutral and sad emotional states in healthy adults 33 . The participants listened to the auditory stimuli through headphones, and they responded by using a two-button box. ...
Emotion studies have commonly reported impaired emotional processing in individuals with heightened anhedonic depressive symptoms, as typically measured by collecting single subjective ratings for a given emotional cue. However, the interindividual variation in moment-to-moment emotional reactivity, and associated time-varying brain networks recruitment as emotions are unfolding, remains unclear. In this study, we filled this gap by using the unique temporal characteristics of music to investigate behavioural and brain network dynamics as a function of anhedonic depressive symptoms severity. Thirty-one neurotypical participants aged 18–30 years completed anhedonic depression questionnaires and then continuously rated happy, neutral and sad pieces of music whilst undergoing MRI scanning. Using a unique combination of dynamic approaches to behavioural (i.e., emotion dynamics) and fMRI (i.e., leading eigenvector dynamics analysis; LEiDA) data analysis, we found that participants higher in anhedonic depressive symptoms exhibited increased recruitment of attentional networks and blunted emotional response to both happy and sad musical excerpts. Anhedonic depression mediated the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting, and the elevated recruitment of attentional networks during emotional pieces of music carried over into subsequent neutral music. Future studies are needed to investigate whether these findings could be generalised to a clinical population (i.e., major depressive disorder).
... The rostral anterior cingulate cortex in the limbic lobe and the parahippocampal gyrus in the temporal lobe are both part of the default mode network. The former is associated with error-related affective responses [38,39], while the latter is associated with emotions when listening to music [40], and temporal lobe is involved in memory encoding and retrieval [41]. In addition, it is reported that the frontal lobe shows responses to unfamiliar melodies [42] and the prefrontal cortex is associated with higher-order cognitive processes [43]. ...
... The process of meaning inference from social signals is a good functional candidate for our observed right lateralised hippocampal/parahippocampal cluster. The parahippocampus has been shown responsive across multiple affect processing tasks across in speech/non-speech audition (Ceravolo et al., 2021;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Proverbio et al., 2020), visual (den Stock et al., 2014), audiovisual stimuli affect (Jansma et al., 2014), as well as contributing towards integration of context with a broad range of perceptual information (Aminoff et al., 2013). ...
Withdrawal Statement
The authors have withdrawn their manuscript owing to data encoding fault causing incorrect analysis. Therefore, the authors do not wish this work to be cited as reference for the project. If you have any questions, please contact the corresponding author.
... For example, from the field of empirical aesthetics, a widely-cited review (Mastandrea, Fagioli et al., 2019) hypothesized a link between well-being and aesthetic experience-a cognitive and affective state founded in the philosophical traditions (Skov & Nadal, 2020), that is evoked by appreciation and results in pleasure (Leder et al., 2004;Pelowski et al., 2017;Mastandrea, Fagioli, et al., 2019;Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2016). Primarily, this link to well-being was suggested to be through the ability of art experiences to evoke pleasure and to activate reward networks in the brain (Mastandrea, Fagioli, et al., 2019) or emotional processing networks associated with short-term changes in mood (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). However, other mechanisms related to identity affirmation or resilience-building, present in leisure and nature-related fields Kaplan, 1995), could be equally important to consider. ...
Abstract:
Art viewing has been increasingly seen as having benefits for well-being. However, research on these impacts is disparate, and our understanding of the processes that underlie the impact of art viewing is underdeveloped. We present a systematic review (CRD42022296890), which critically evaluates the evidence of the well-being effects of art viewing, summarizes the characteristics of art viewing experiences and study designs, and presents a thematic analysis of mechanisms. CINAHL, EBSCOhost, Scopus, and Pubmed were searched, and 38 papers were included, with a total of N = 5,092 participants. Quantitative synthesis revealed a diversity of schedules, components, and outcomes. Further, more rigorous methodology is needed, as less than a quarter included controlconditions. However, eudemonic well-being emerged as understudied yet had convergent evidence of effect. The thematic analysis revealed affective, cognitive, social, self-transformative, and resilience-building mechanisms. We provide reporting guidelines and a detailed database of included articles for future researchers.
... Happy music can generate positive effects and enhance energy levels because it activates the ventral and dorsal striatum that are involved in the reward experience. Sad music typically leads to negative effects since it involves the activation of the hippocampus and amygdala which are important for memory and emotion processing (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Saarikallio and Erkkilä, 2007). Some researchers claimed that sad music can also induce a pleasant emotion (Kawakami et al., 2013) when the listeners have a sweet anticipation from the sad music (Huron, 2006) and/or evaluate it as art and thus have enjoyment from listening to it (Koelsch, 2013). ...
This study uses theories of habit and self-control to explore the relationship between musical habits and smartphone addiction among college students. Our findings reveal that self-control mediates this relationship, with individual differences playing a significant role. While musical listening habits, impacted by personal genre preferences, positively impact self-control, active music engagement, through playing an instrument and/or creating music, negatively affects it. We suggest using interventions to promote mindful music engagement to mitigate smartphone addiction. These insights contribute to understanding how music habits influence digital behaviors and offer practical strategies for fostering healthier smartphone use among college populations.
... This study used a semi-experimental pre-test, post-test design with a control group to investigate the effect of classical music on agility and quick penalty shooting in female basketball players. Classical music is designed based on the Jones and Vista 2006 model (13). The study participants were 30 healthy and right-handed young women with an average age of 18 -22 years. ...
Background: The global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced athletes worldwide. Objectives: This research aims to investigate the effects of a 4-week aerobic exercise program on athletic performance in both recovered and uninfected COVID-19 athletes during the post-COVID-19 period. Methods: Fourteen male student-athletes aged 18 - 25 years from Imam Khomeini International University participated in this study. The participants comprised 7 recovered COVID-19 athletes and 7 athletes with no prior COVID-19 infection. The study employed a pre-test/post-test design conducted in 2 phases. During the pre and post-test phases, participants underwent baseline assessments of athletic performance, including maximum oxygen consumption (VO2 max) and anaerobic power. Subsequently, the participants engaged in a 4-week aerobic exercise intervention. Pre- and post-intervention outcomes within groups were compared using paired t-tests, while independent t-tests were utilized for comparisons between the recovered COVID-19 athlete group and the uninfected athlete group. Results: Independent t-tests demonstrated significant increases in VO2 max and peak power after 4 weeks of aerobic exercise in both the recovered COVID-19 group (P = 0.001, P = 0.0001) and the uninfected COVID-19 group (P = 0.012, P = 0.001). However, dependent t-tests revealed a significant difference between the recovered COVID-19 group and the uninfected COVID-19 group in the post-test of VO2 max (P = 0.044) and peak power (P = 0.001). Conclusions: This study indicates that a 4-week aerobic exercise regimen can improve athletic performance in both recovered and uninfected COVID-19 athletes. However, recovered COVID-19 athletes exhibited a notably slower rate of improvement compared to their uninfected counterparts. Therefore, it is recommended that, in addition to aerobic exercise, recovered athletes integrate supplementary strategies to optimize their return-to-sport timeline and maximize performance recovery.
... In experimental psychology and neuroscience, the selection of music excerpts for emotion-inducing purposes usually does not follow a rigorous decision process and may be based on a variety of sources. These include expert opinion (e.g., Bigand et al., 2005;Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2011;Robazza et al., 1994), use in previous research (e.g., Lin et al., 2010;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Sammler et al., 2007;Schellenberg et al., 2008), pilot work (e.g., Altenmüller, 2002;Pêcher et al., 2009;Roy et al., 2008;Stephens et al., 2010;Witvliet & Vrana, 2007), the authors' own research (e.g., Koelstra et al., 2011;Peretz, 1998), or a combination of the above (e.g., Kreutz et al., 2008;Ritossa & Rickard, 2004). In other cases, stimuli are composed by the authors themselves (e.g., Gosselin et al., 2005;Koelsch et al., 2006;Lundqvist et al., 2009;Morton & Trehub, 2007;Vieillard et al., 2008). ...
Selecting appropriate musical stimuli to induce specific emotions represents a recurring challenge in music and emotion research. Most existing stimuli have been categorized according to taxonomies derived from general emotion models (e.g., basic emotions, affective circumplex), have been rated for perceived emotions, and are rarely defined in terms of interrater agreement. To redress these limitations, we present research that served in the development of a new interactive online database, including an initial set of 364 music excerpts from three different genres (classical, pop, and hip/hop) that were rated for felt emotion using the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), a music-specific emotion scale. The sample comprised 517 English- and German-speaking participants and each excerpt was rated by an average of 28.76 participants (SD = 7.99). Data analyses focused on research questions that are of particular relevance for musical database development, notably the number of raters required to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music and the adequacy of the GEMS as a tool for describing music-evoked emotions across three prominent music genres. Overall, our findings suggest that 10–20 raters are sufficient to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music excerpts in most cases, and that the GEMS shows promise as a valid and comprehensive annotation tool for music databases.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-024-02336-0.
... These results underscore promising neurophysiological and psychological benefits of music therapy as an alternative treatment approach for children and adolescents with ADHD, though further research is required to better understand the effect and mechanisms of music therapy for ADHD (Park et al., 2023). Music has been used to act as a powerful medium for emotional regulation, characterized by alterations in melody and rhythm that match different emotional states (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Fernandez-Sotos et al., 2016;Feng et al., 2019;Koelsch, 2020) ( Figure 1). A significant reduction in depression ratings among 251 children aged 8-16 years old with social, emotional, behavioral and developmental disorders was observed after 12 weeks of playing with musical instruments such as guitars, xylophones and keyboards (Porter et al., 2017). ...
Acoustic stimuli such as music or ambient noise can significantly affect physiological and psychological health in humans. We here summarize positive effects of music therapy in premature infant distress regulation, performance enhancement, sleep quality control, and treatment of mental disorders. Specifically, music therapy exhibits promising effects on treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). We also highlight regulatory mechanisms by which auditory intervention affects an organism, encompassing modulation of immune responses, gene expression, neurotransmitter regulation and neural circuitry. As a safe, cost-effective and non-invasive intervention, music therapy offers substantial potential in treating a variety of neurological conditions.
... During the fMRI acquisition, all participants were required to listen to 13 pieces of classical music and asked to continuously rate how each piece of music made them feel on a scale of -6 (very sad) to +6 (very happy). These pieces of music were chosen as they have previously been identified as eliciting happy, neutral and sad emotional states in healthy adults (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). The participants listened to the auditory stimuli through headphones, and they responded by using a twobutton box. ...
Recent studies have reported atypical emotional processing in individuals with greater levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. However, the relationship between brain networks dynamics and moment-to-moment affective responses to naturalistic paradigms, as emotions are unfolding, remains unclear. In this study, we used the unique temporal characteristics of music to investigate behavioural and brain network dynamics as a function of anhedonic depressive symptoms severity in healthy adults during an emotionally provocative music listening task. Thirty-one neurotypical participants aged 18-30 years were required to continuously rate happy, neutral and sad pieces of music whilst undergoing MRI scanning. They were also asked to fill in questionnaires assessing their levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. Using a novel fMRI analysis method called Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis (LEiDA), we found an increased probability of occurrence of attentional networks and a blunted emotional response to both happy and sad pieces of music in participants with greater levels of anhedonic depressive symptoms. More specifically, anhedonic depressive symptoms mediated the relationship between attentional networks recruitment and emotional blunting. Furthermore, the elevated recruitment of attentional networks during emotional pieces of music carried over into subsequent neutral music. Future studies are needed to investigate whether these findings could be generalised to a clinical population (i.e., Major Depressive Disorder).
... This study used a semi-experimental pre-test, post-test design with a control group to investigate the effect of classical music on agility and quick penalty shooting in female basketball players. Classical music is designed based on the Jones and Vista 2006 model (13). The study participants were 30 healthy and right-handed young women with an average age of 18 -22 years. ...
Background: The psychological and physiological effects of music have become an attractive field of sports research in the past decade. Objectives: This study investigated the effect of classical music on two sports skills, agility and free throw shooting, in female basketball players. Methods: The study population consisted of all female basketball players on a team. From those who met the study criteria, 26 participants were randomly assigned to two groups: a control group (without classical music) and an experimental group (with classical music). The research variables were measured using pre-tests and post-tests. Independent t-test was used to test the research hypotheses. Results: The results of the statistical tests showed a significant difference in post-test scores between the experimental and control groups (P < .05). Conclusions: Listening to classical music significantly improved the performance of female basketball players on agility and free throw shoo ting tasks.
... Thanks to advances in biomedical technology, we can now examine the impact of music on the human body with greater precision. Studies have used various instruments, including fMRI machines, EEG, and ECG, to observe changes in dopamine levels, brain activity, blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen saturation in response to musical stimuli [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. These findings provide valuable insights into the therapeutic potential of music and its effects on the body and mind. ...
Algorithms strive to capture the intricacies of our complex world, but translating qualitative aspects into quantifiable data poses a significant challenge. In our paper, we embark on a journey to unveil the hidden structure of music by exploring the interplay between our predictions and the sequence of musical events. Our ultimate goal is to gain insights into how certainty fluctuates throughout a musical piece using a three-fold approach: a listening test, reinforcement learning (RL), and graph construction. Through this approach, we seek to understand how musical expectancy affects physiological measurements, visualize the graphical structure of a composition, and analyze the accuracy of prediction accuracy across 15 musical pieces. We conducted a listening test using western classical music on 50 subjects, monitoring changes in blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen saturation in response to different segments of the music. We also assessed the accuracy of the RL agent in predicting notes and pitches individually and simultaneously. Our findings reveal that the average accuracy of the RL agent in note and pitch prediction is 64.17% and 22.48%, respectively, while the accuracy for simultaneous prediction is 73.84%. These results give us a glimpse into the minimum level of certainty present across any composition. To further analyze the accuracy of the RL agent, we propose novel directed graphs in our paper. Our analysis shows that the variance of the edge distributions in the graph is inversely proportional to the accuracy of the RL agent. Through this comprehensive study, we hope to shed light on the enigmatic nature of music and pave the way for future research in this fascinating field.
... Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, et al., 2007)。这些 Li, Wang, Chou, et al., 2015；付饶， ...
... In this task, all participants viewed the same previously-piloted three-minute compilation of baby animals (puppies, kittens, ducklings, piglets, etc.). It was set to music that has been empirically-validated for inducing positive emotion ("A Little Night Music (Allegro)" by Mozart; Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). Participants were instructed to savor while watching the video. ...
Background:
Intentional attempts to savor positive emotions may be infrequent in Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) due to avoidance of emotional contrasts. Yet purposeful enjoyment may help reduce worry and increase wellbeing in GAD. We sought to explore 1) the frequency, intensity, and duration of positive emotions from savoring in GAD and 2) its effect on pre-existing worry.
Method:
The same 139 participants participated in two studies. They first took baseline measures. After, they were explicitly taught about savoring practices. In study 1, all participants were instructed to savor a photograph and video, timing and rating their emotion. Then in study 2, participants underwent a worry induction followed by an interventional experiment. In a savoring condition, participants were instructed to savor a personally-chosen enjoyable video. In a control condition, participants watched an emotionally neutral video.
Results:
Participants who met DSM-5 criteria for GAD had significantly lower scores on naturalistic savoring via self-report than those without GAD. Yet when explicitly taught and directed to savor in study 1, there were no differences between those with and without GAD in positive emotion duration and intensity. In study 2, longitudinal linear mixed models demonstrated that savoring after a worry induction significantly decreased worry, decreased anxiety, and increased positive emotions to greater degrees than the control task. These changes did not differ between diagnostic groups. All analyses controlled for depression symptoms.
Conclusion:
Although persons with GAD tend to savor less in daily life than those without GAD, intentional savoring may decrease worry and increase positive emotion for both groups.
... In addition to the fundamental differences between the neuroimaging methods described, the discrepancies in literature might be ascribed to the overlapping of some of the neural correlates related to happiness and sadness perceived in music (Brattico et al., 2011;Khalfa et al., 2005;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007). Brain structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, and regions of the reward circuit are involved in both pleasantness and unpleasantness perception in music (Blood et al., 1999;Blood & Zatorre, 2001;Suzuki et al., 2008). ...
Since ancient Greece, major and minor modes in Western tonal music have been identified as the primary responsible musical feature for eliciting emotional states. As such, the underlying correlates of the major-minor mode dichotomy in music perception have been extensively investigated through decades of psychological and neuroscientific research, providing plentiful yet often discordant results. Specifically, crucial questions remain about the several factors contributing to the affective perception of major and minor modes, at times very different among individuals. Moreover, major and minor mode perception has never been quantitatively compared in literature. This comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to provide a qualitative and quantitative synthesis of musical mode perception and its behavioural and neural correlates. The qualitative synthesis resulted in 69 studies, showing great diversity in how the major-minor dichotomy has been empirically approached. Most studies reviewed were conducted on adults, considered participants’ expertise, employed real-life musical stimuli, performed behavioural evaluations, and were carried out among Western listeners. Behavioural, electroencephalography, and neuroimaging meta-analyses (36 studies) consistently showed that major and minor mode elicit distinct neural and emotional responses. Based on our findings, a framework to describe a Major-Minor Mode(l) of music perception and its behavioural and physiological correlates is proposed, incorporating individual factors such as age, expertise, cultural background, and emotional disorders. Limitations, implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed, including putative clinical applications of major-minor dichotomy and best practices regarding stimulation paradigms for musical mode investigation.
Public Significance Statement
This study provides qualitative and quantitative evidence of the distinct behavioral and neural responses elicited by major and minor mode, while also highlighting the influence of factors such as age, culture, personality, and health. Results offers a detailed overview of the major-minor dichotomy in music, putting forward an integrated and critical discussion of methodologies, paradigms, and clinical implications of this pivotal musical feature.
... The study used excerpts of absolute music expressive of sadness (e.g., Barber's Adagio for Strings), happiness (e.g., Vivaldi's Spring), and fear (e.g., Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain), inter alia. Along with other experiments, results reveal that contagion induces feelings that significantly share features of ordinary emotions in terms of physiological changes, neural bases, facial expressions, and behavior [9,27,[127][128][129]. For instance, contagion with sad music involves changes in electrodermal activity, heart rate, respiration rate, and temperature that are characteristic of sadness. ...
Music has strong emotional powers. How are we to understand affective responses to music? What does music teach us about emotions? Why are musical emotions important? Despite the rich literature in philosophy and the empirical sciences, particularly psychology and neuroscience, little attention has been paid to integrating these approaches. This extensive review aims to redress this imbalance and establish a mutual dialogue between philosophy and the empirical sciences by presenting the main philosophical puzzles from an affective science perspective. The chief problem is contagion. Sometimes, listeners perceive music as expressing some emotion and this elicits the same emotion in them. Contagion is perplexing because it collides with the leading theory of emotions as experiences of values. This article mostly revolves around the critical presentation of the philosophical solutions to this problem in light of recent developments in emotion theory and affective science. It also highlights practical issues, particularly the role of musical emotions in well-being and health, by tackling the paradox of sad music, i.e., the question of why people enjoy sad music. It thus bridges an important gap between theoretical and real-life issues as well as between philosophical and empirical investigations on affective responses to music.
... Nas últimas décadas, muitos estudos em Neurociência têm demonstrado que tanto a música instrumental quanto as canções consistem em excelentes elementos para estudo das emoções, uma vez que não somente são capazes de despertar respostas com valência positiva e negativa, mas, também, e principalmente, por estas respostas serem consistentes mesmo em indivíduos de culturas diferentes. (BRATTICO et al., 2011;FRITZ et al., 2009;GOSSELIN et al., 2007;GOSSELIN et al., 2011;KOELSCH et al., 2006;KOELSCH, 2011;MITTERSCHIFFTHALER et al., 2007;OMAR et al., 2011, SAMSON;EHRLE;BAULAC, 2001;WONG et al., 2012). ...
O presente artigo propõe mostrar a importância da música na inclusão escolar de crianças autistas. Para tal, foi feito um levantamento bibliográfico, seguido de uma pesquisa teórica, com dados coletados a partir de obras que já existem sobre o assunto. Destacam-se os estudos de diversos autores, que concordam entre si, no sentido de que a música influi diretamente no metabolismo humano, e por isso, procurou-se aplicá-la de forma terapêutica, nas enfermidades. O texto traz informações sobre o que é o Transtorno do Espectro Autista (TEA), suas principais características, e como a música facilita a aprendizagem, ainda esboça as diferenças entre Educação Musical e Musicoterapia. A expectativa desta pesquisadora é levar o leitor à uma reflexão, seguida de conscientização, de que a música pode melhorar consideravelmente a qualidade de vida de crianças autistas, por ser uma atividade que entrelaça a fala, a linguagem, a interação social e trabalha com a funcionalidade do comportamento, por meio de aspectos psicomotores.
... Excerpts associated with anger, happiness, and sadness could be identified within a duration of less than 100 ms (Nordström & Laukka, 2019). Finally, several researchers have shown that music induces the same emotional responses as a basic emotion (Gagnon & Peretz, 2003;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Witvliet & Vrana, 2007). For example, in Lundqvist et al. (2009), musical excerpts were chosen to represent a specific emotion and these excerpts induced the same emotions in the listeners. ...
If music connects to our most resonant emotional strings, why have not we used it to assess emotions? Our goal was to develop and validate the Measure of Emotions by Music (MEM). A total of 280 participants were randomly assigned to MEM Condition 1 (excerpts) or MEM Condition 2 (excerpts and adjectives). All participants responded to the PANAS-X. The internal consistency (α) of the MEM subscales (Happy, Sad, Scary, Peaceful) was in acceptable-to-strong range and similar to the PANAS-X. Construct validity of the MEM illustrated cohesive convergence to the PANAS-X. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the validity of a four-factor solution, as intended in the MEM. Split-half reliability shows good fidelity. A total of 69% of the respondents mentioned a preference for the MEM. The MEM demonstrates very good psychometric characteristics, seems to be an appreciated way to measure emotional states and may represent an interesting alternative for clinical groups having difficulties to identify their emotion with words.
... However, it could also be associated with alerting attention as fMRI has a relatively poor temporal resolution (Glover, 2011;Loued-Khenissi et al., 2019;Puttaert et al., 2020), which may make it difficult to parse the alerting subsystem from the executive control subsystem given the short interstimulus period between the cue offset and the target onset (i.e., 400 milliseconds). Regardless, music listening activates areas of the brain associated with attention (Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Brattico et al., 2011). Music listening also promotes neural entrainment, specifically in response to musical features such as rhythm and pitch (Nozaradan et al., 2011(Nozaradan et al., , 2012Doelling and Poeppel, 2015;Wollman et al., 2020). ...
Of the three subtypes of attention outlined by the attentional subsystems model, alerting (vigilance or arousal needed for task completion) and executive control (the ability to inhibit distracting information while completing a goal) are susceptible to age-related decline, while orienting remains relatively stable. Yet, few studies have investigated strategies that may acutely maintain or promote attention in typically aging older adults. Music listening may be one potential strategy for attentional maintenance as past research shows that listening to happy music characterized by a fast tempo and major mode increases cognitive task performance, likely by increasing cognitive arousal. The present study sought to investigate whether listening to happy music (fast tempo, major mode) impacts alerting, orienting, and executive control attention in 57 middle and older-aged adults (M = 61.09 years, SD = 7.16). Participants completed the Attention Network Test (ANT) before and after listening to music rated as happy or sad (slow tempo, minor mode), or no music (i.e., silence) for 10 min. Our results demonstrate that happy music increased alerting attention, particularly when relevant and irrelevant information conflicted within a trial. Contrary to what was predicted, sad music modulated executive control performance. Overall, our findings indicate that music written in the major mode with a fast tempo (happy) and minor mode with a slow tempo (sad) modulate different aspects of attention in the short-term.
... The insula plays an important role in emotion processing and monitors internal emotional states e.g., disgust, happiness, and sadness (Chen et al., 2009;Pohl et al., 2013). Therefore, the increased activity of the thalamus, amygdala, insula and other regions e.g., the hippocampus, ACC, and ventral striatum is according to the role of these regions in emotion regulation and retrieving positive autobiographical memories (Bush et al., 2000;Hare et al., 2005;Marci et al., 2007Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007Suardi et al., 2016). ...
Despite the existence of several emotion regulation studies using neurofeedback, interactions among a small number of regions were evaluated, and therefore, further investigation is needed to understand the interactions of the brain regions involved in emotion regulation. We implemented electroencephalography (EEG) neurofeedback with simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using a modified happiness-inducing task through autobiographical memories to upregulate positive emotion. Then, an explorative analysis of whole brain regions was done to understand the effect of neurofeedback on brain activity and the interaction of whole brain regions involved in emotion regulation. The participants in the control and experimental groups were asked to do emotion regulation while viewing positive images of autobiographical memories and getting sham or real (based on alpha asymmetry) EEG neurofeedback, respectively. The proposed multimodal approach quantified the effects of EEG neurofeedback in changing EEG alpha power, fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) activity of prefrontal, occipital, parietal, and limbic regions (up to 1.9% increase), and functional connectivity in/between prefrontal, parietal, limbic system, and insula in the experimental group. New connectivity links were identified by comparing the brain functional connectivity between experimental conditions (Upregulation and View blocks) and also by comparing the brain connectivity of the experimental and control groups. Psychometric assessments confirmed significant changes in positive and negative mood states in the experimental group by neurofeedback. Based on the exploratory analysis of activity and connectivity among all brain regions involved in emotion regions, we found significant BOLD and functional connectivity increases due to EEG neurofeedback in the experimental group, but no learning effect was observed in the control group. The results reveal several new connections among brain regions as a result of EEG neurofeedback which can be justified according to emotion regulation models and the role of those regions in emotion regulation and recalling positive autobiographical memories.
... anterior and posterior cingulate [36], hippocampus [37], and PHC [36,37]. Moreover, sad music has been shown to be effective in modulating anterior cingulate cortex [38], posterior cingulate cortex [39], PHC [38], etc. ...
Although apparently paradoxical, sad music has been effective in coping with sad life experiences. The underpinning brain neural correlates of this are not well explored. We performed Electroencephalography (EEG) source-level analysis for the brain during a sad autobiographical recall (SAR) and upon exposure to sad music. We specifically investigated the Cingulate cortex complex and Parahippocampus (PHC) regions, areas prominently involved in emotion and memory processing. Results show enhanced alpha band lag phase-synchronization in the brain during sad music listening, especially within and between the Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and (PHC) compared to SAR. This enhancement was lateralized for alpha1 and alpha2 bands in the left and right hemispheres, respectively. We also observed a significant increase in alpha2 brain current source density (CSD) during sad music listening compared to SAR and baseline resting state in the region of interest (ROI). Brain during SAR condition had enhanced right hemisphere lateralized functional connectivity and CSD in gamma band compared to sad music listening and baseline resting state. Our findings show that the brain during the SAR state had enhanced gamma-band activity, signifying increased content binding capacity. At the same time, the brain is associated with an enhanced alpha band activity while sad music listening, signifying increased content-specific information processing. Thus, the results suggest that the brain’s neural correlates during sad music listening are distinct from the SAR state as well as the baseline resting state and facilitate enhanced content-specific information processing potentially through three-channel neural pathways—(1) by enhancing the network connectivity in the region of interest (ROI), (2) by enhancing local cortical integration of areas in ROI, and (3) by enhancing sustained attention. We argue that enhanced content-specific information processing possibly supports the positive experience during sad music listening post a sad experience in a healthy population. Finally, we propose that sadness has two different characteristics under SAR state and sad music listening.
... Estas líneas de investigación han sido asistidas por el desarrollo vertiginoso de la neurociencia. Es común encontrar trabajos sobre la neurobiología de las expectativas musicales (Ferreri et al., 2019;Koelsch et al., 2008;Nemati et al., 2019;Salimpoor et al., 2015;Trainor & Zatorre, 2016), correlatos neurológicos de respuestas emocionales a la música (Altenmüller et al., 2002;Koelsch, 2010;Mitterschiffthaler et al., 2007;Panksepp & Bernatzky, 2002), la neurociencia de la percepción del pulso y la métrica (Cameron & Grahn, 2016;Geiser et al., 2009;Large & Snyder, 2009;Patel & Iversen, 2014), bases neurológicas de la cognición musical anómala (Gosselin et al., 2007;Griffiths et al., 2004;Tillmann et al., 2016) y estudios comparativos sobre plasticidad cerebral en músicos y no músicos (Bermudez et al., 2009;Hyde et al., 2009;Park et al., 2014;Quiroga-Martinez et al., 2020). ...
Este trabajo colectivo, titulado La musicología en la formación
universitaria: Investigar para comprender contribuye a la labor
de divulgación del conocimiento y experiencias pedagógicas de una comunidad académica dedicada a la investigación de la educación musical, la cual se ha ido fortaleciendo y enriqueciendo a través del diálogo en los distintos encuentros propiciados por los integrantes del Cuerpo Académico (CA) consolidado UAACA-117, Educación y Conocimiento de la Música, quienes desde 2016, desarrollan dos líneas de investigación orientadas a la comprensión de los procesos de conocimiento y producción musicales y de los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje.
ABSTRACT
Art viewing is increasingly seen as having benefits for well-being. Despite this, evidence is scattered, and the siloed nature of past research stunts our mechanistic understanding. To address this, we systematically reviewed (CRD42022296890) the evidence of the effects of art viewing on well-being, summarised the characteristics of art viewing experiences, study designs, and results, and thematically analysed suggested mechanisms. CINAHL, EBSCOhost, Scopus, and PubMed were searched, 3893 abstracts were screened, and 38 papers were included (N = 6805 participants). Quantitative synthesis revealed a diversity of settings, schedules, activities, and outcomes. Thematic analysis revealed affective, cognitive, social, self-transformative, and resilience-building mechanisms that were often context-dependent. While convergent evidence exists for eudemonic well-being, we found no strong support for other well-being outcomes. More rigorous methodology and a focus on activity components and mechanisms is needed. We make recommendations and introduce the new Receptive Art Activity Research Reporting Guidelines (RAARR, https://osf.io/qjg72/) to support future research.
This study aims to establish an innovative AI-based social–emotional music classification model named SEM-Net, specifically designed to integrate three core positive social–emotional elements—positive outlook, empathy, and problem-solving—into classical music, facilitating accurate emotional classification of musical excerpts related to emotional states. SEM-Net employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture composed of 17 meticulously structured layers to capture complex emotional and musical features effectively. To further enhance the precision and robustness of the classification system, advanced social–emotional music feature preprocessing and sophisticated feature extraction techniques were developed, significantly improving the model’s predictive performance. Experimental results demonstrate that SEM-Net achieves an impressive final classification accuracy of 94.13%, substantially surpassing the baseline method by 54.78% and outperforming other widely used deep learning architectures, including conventional CNN, LSTM, and Transformer models, by at least 27%. The proposed SEM-Net system facilitates emotional regulation and meaningfully enhances emotional and musical literacy, social communication skills, and overall quality of life for individuals with special needs, offering a practical, scalable, and accessible tool that contributes significantly to personalized emotional growth and social–emotional learning.
The aim of this study is to investigate activity and functional connectivity (FC) of Papez circuit networks associated with music processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in depressed breast cancer patients. Twenty-three breast cancer patients listened to four different Iranian/Persian music paradigms during the resting-state fMRI scanning session: negative stimulation of traditional music, negative stimulation of pop music, positive stimulation of traditional music and positive stimulation of pop music. The amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) was used to evaluate the local characteristics of spontaneous brain activity. FC maps were created using multivariate ROI-to-ROI connectivity (mRRC) and Papez circuit-based regions of interest (ROIs) selection. We found that music increases FC within various brain networks which are involved in memory, emotion, and cognitive function, including the limbic system, the default mode network (DMN), salience network (SN), and central executive network (CEN). Moreover, it seems that the traditional types (both positive and negative) of Iranian music may be more effective to affect brain activity in the patients with breast cancer, than the Iranian pop music. These findings demonstrate that music therapy, as an effective and easily applicable approach, supports the neuropsychological recovery and can contribute to standard treatment protocols in patients with breast cancer.
Background
Postural instability and gait disturbances (PIGD) represent a significant cause of disability in Parkinson's disease (PD). Cholinergic system dysfunction has been implicated in falls in PD. The occurrence of falls typically results in fear of falling (FoF) that in turn may lead to poorer balance self-efficacy. Balance self-efficacy refers to one's level of confidence in their ability to balance while completing activities of daily living like getting dressed, bathing, and walking. Lower self-efficacy, or greater FoF during these activities is a function of motor, cognitive, and emotional impairments and may impact quality of life in PD. Unlike known cholinergic reduction, especially in the right lateral geniculate and caudate nuclei, little is known about the role of cholinergic transporters in FoF or mobility self-efficacy in PD.
Methods
[¹⁸F]fluoroethoxybenzovesamicol ([¹⁸F]FEOBV) positron emission tomography (PET) studies were conducted to assess vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT) expression in 126 patients with PD (male (m) = 95, female (f) = 31). Participants had a mean age of 67.3 years (standard deviation (SD) = 7.1) and median Hoehn Yahr stage of 2.5. Patients also completed the Short Falls Efficacy Scale (sFES-I) as a survey measure of concerns about falling. [¹⁸F]FEOBV data were processed in Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) using a voxel-wise regression model with sFES-I scores as the outcome measure.
Results
Reduced [¹⁸F]FEOBV binding in tectum, metathalamic (lateral more than medial geniculate nuclei), thalamus proper, bilateral mesiotemporal (hippocampal, parahippocampal, fusiform gyri and fimbriae), and right cerebellar lobule VI significantly associated with higher sFES-I scores (p < 0.05, family-wise error (FWE) correction after Threshold-Free Cluster Enhancement (TFCE)).
Conclusions
Unlike the more limited involvement of the brainstem-thalamic complex and caudate nuclei cholinergic topography associated with falls in PD, cholinergic reductions in the extended connectivity between the thalamic complex and the temporal limbic system via the fimbriae associates with FoF. Additional cholinergic changes were seen in the cerebellum. The temporal limbic system plays a role not only in episodic memory but also in spatial navigation, scene and contextual (e.g., emotional) processing. Findings may augur novel therapeutic approaches to treat poor mobility self-efficacy in PD.
Clinical Trial Registration
No: NCT02458430. Registered 18 March, 2015, https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02458430; No: NCT05459753. Registered 01 July, 2022, https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05459753.
This chapter discusses the importance of musical interventions in neurodevelopment, highlighting the therapeutic effects of music in different brain areas and for different neurodevelopmental disorders. Music involves perceptual-motor and executive brain functions, transforming physical signals into emotional states and affecting physiological rhythms. Music processing requires several brain areas related to the perception of volume, timbre, rhythm, gestalt, and the pleasure and reward system. In the chapter, the authors present studies showing the effect of music on cognition and socio-emotional skills in children with typical and atypical development, such as children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Language Disorder, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Finally, the authors present evidence that musical interventions can be useful tools in the rehabilitation of neurodevelopmental disorders, providing several therapeutic benefits.
Neuroscientific research on emotion has developed dramatically over the past decade. The cognitive neuroscience of human emotion, which has emerged as the new and thriving area of 'affective neuroscience', is rapidly rendering existing overviews of the field obsolete. This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative survey of knowledge and topics investigated in this cutting-edge field. It covers a range of topics, from face and voice perception to pain and music, as well as social behaviors and decision making. The book considers and interrogates multiple research methods, among them brain imaging and physiology measurements, as well as methods used to evaluate behavior and genetics. Editors Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier have enlisted well-known and active researchers from more than twenty institutions across three continents, bringing geographic as well as methodological breadth to the collection. This timely volume will become a key reference work for researchers and students in the growing field of neuroscience.
Neuroscientific research on emotion has developed dramatically over the past decade. The cognitive neuroscience of human emotion, which has emerged as the new and thriving area of 'affective neuroscience', is rapidly rendering existing overviews of the field obsolete. This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative survey of knowledge and topics investigated in this cutting-edge field. It covers a range of topics, from face and voice perception to pain and music, as well as social behaviors and decision making. The book considers and interrogates multiple research methods, among them brain imaging and physiology measurements, as well as methods used to evaluate behavior and genetics. Editors Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier have enlisted well-known and active researchers from more than twenty institutions across three continents, bringing geographic as well as methodological breadth to the collection. This timely volume will become a key reference work for researchers and students in the growing field of neuroscience.
Neuroscientific research on emotion has developed dramatically over the past decade. The cognitive neuroscience of human emotion, which has emerged as the new and thriving area of 'affective neuroscience', is rapidly rendering existing overviews of the field obsolete. This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative survey of knowledge and topics investigated in this cutting-edge field. It covers a range of topics, from face and voice perception to pain and music, as well as social behaviors and decision making. The book considers and interrogates multiple research methods, among them brain imaging and physiology measurements, as well as methods used to evaluate behavior and genetics. Editors Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier have enlisted well-known and active researchers from more than twenty institutions across three continents, bringing geographic as well as methodological breadth to the collection. This timely volume will become a key reference work for researchers and students in the growing field of neuroscience.
Neuroscientific research on emotion has developed dramatically over the past decade. The cognitive neuroscience of human emotion, which has emerged as the new and thriving area of 'affective neuroscience', is rapidly rendering existing overviews of the field obsolete. This handbook provides a comprehensive, up-to-date and authoritative survey of knowledge and topics investigated in this cutting-edge field. It covers a range of topics, from face and voice perception to pain and music, as well as social behaviors and decision making. The book considers and interrogates multiple research methods, among them brain imaging and physiology measurements, as well as methods used to evaluate behavior and genetics. Editors Jorge Armony and Patrik Vuilleumier have enlisted well-known and active researchers from more than twenty institutions across three continents, bringing geographic as well as methodological breadth to the collection. This timely volume will become a key reference work for researchers and students in the growing field of neuroscience.
In the realm of healthy dietary choices about reducing sweetness perception, the exploration of crossmodal effects stands as a frequently employed approach. Both music and color can independently influence flavor evaluation and gustatory experience by eliciting emotions. However, less research has been done on the effects of audio-visual crossmodal interactions on sweetness expectations and perceptions. The present study conducted two experiments delving into the crossmodal effect on sweetness expectation and perception of milk tea by manipulating the emotional valence of music and packaging color. The results showed that positive (vs. negative) music led to higher sweetness expectations and perceptions for milk teas with neutral packaging color. Irrespective of music, participants had higher sweetness expectations for milk tea with positive or neutral (vs. negative) packaging colors. The congruence of valence between music and packaging color influenced sweetness perception. Positive (vs. negative) music correlated with a sweeter perception when the packaging color was positive. Exposed to negative music, subjects showed a higher sweetness perception with negative (vs. positive) packaging colors. In conclusion, the results suggest that the valence of music and packaging color crossmodally influence consumers’ evaluation of milk tea, and it differs depending on whether it was tasted. Thus, this study has demonstrated the crossmodal influence of music and packaging color, providing valuable implications for healthy eating and marketing applications.
Previous studies show that therapist mood is associated with psychotherapy processes, but the observational nature of these studies does not allow for causal inference. It is also unclear if other therapist characteristics, such as therapist trait empathy, moderate the relation between therapist mood and process variables. Thirty-four therapists and volunteer client dyads participated in three weekly counseling sessions. Before each session, therapists were induced to experience one of three moods, elation, depression, or neutral, in a counterbalanced order, using a combination of music and the Velten method. After each session, clients rated therapist empathy and session quality, therapists rated session quality, and observers rated therapist empathy using videotapes. Electrocardiogram was collected from therapists and clients during the session to assess heart rate synchrony as an indicator of therapist empathy. Therapist trait empathy moderated the effect of mood induction on observer-rated therapist empathy, such that when induced to experience elation, therapists with high trait empathy were observed to be more empathic, whereas therapists with low trait empathy were observed to be less empathic. Therapists of different trait empathy levels did not differ on observer-rated empathy when induced to experience depression or neutral mood. No significant effect of mood induction was found for client-rated empathy, client- and therapist-rated session quality, or heart rate synchrony. The experimental design offers preliminary evidence that therapist presession mood may influence the psychotherapy process. The findings are explained in light of empathy amplification and empathy attenuation hypotheses in relation to positive emotion. Practice and research implications are discussed.
Spiritual practices lead to untold benefits, particularly leading to a tranquil and happy mind, besides manifesting a plethora of holistic health benefits. While neuroscience views spirituality as a functioning of the mind, is there more to it? A key focus of the chapter is on advanced imaging modalities like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography PET), etc. These non-invasive imaging technologies are greatly furthering our understanding of the intricate mechanisms and connections linking spirituality and happiness/wellbeing. Some of the advances in neuroscience imaging, establishing the crucial link between spirituality-associated structural and functional changes in the brain (neuroplasticity), are discussed. The role of long-term meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and automatic self-transcending) and music in enhancing the explicit functions of specific areas of the human brain and inducing neuroplasticity are also enumerated. Does being spiritual help in better stress management and a happy mind? This question has been addressed in the light of advances in neurosciences, particularly discussing the role of genetic and epigenetic factors. The spiritual belief system and its concomitant psychological and health benefits are highlighted. Strong research evidence indicates that spiritual practices can be harnessed for cognitive training of military personnel and astronauts and space-farers in future, and amid the current ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, spirituality can help build resilience and help establish a peaceful state of mind. These issues have been addressed in the light of contemporary literature. The last sections of the chapter discuss future perspectives and highlight how, with advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, it should be possible in future to modulate artificial neural networks to enhance happiness. With the limitations of current modalities to investigate the functioning of the highly complex human brain, neuroscience research is likely to take several years to fully unravel the mysteries of spirituality and consciousness; however, nearly everyone can benefit from the contentment and true happiness that naturally comes from being spiritual!KeywordsEternal happinessNeuroscience imagingSpirituality Induces NeuroplasticityStress management
Reward Positivity (RewP) is a feedback‐locked event‐related potential component that is specifically elicited by rewarding feedback and scales with positive reward prediction error, a hallmark of reinforcement learning models. The RewP is also diminished in depression, suggesting that it may be a novel marker of anhedonia. Here, we examined if a sad mood induction offered an opportunity to causally induce a mood‐related alteration of the RewP and reward‐related learning. In Experiment 1 (N = 50 total), participants were randomly assigned to previously established sad or neutral mood induction procedures before a probabilistic selection task. This manipulation failed to induce changes in affect, suggesting that standard methods are inadequate. In Experiment 2 (N = 50 total), participants were randomly assigned to newly developed happy versus sad mood manipulations, which successfully induced large changes in affect. While the RewP was unaffected by mood induction, positive mood moderated the relationship between prediction error encoding in the RewP and reward learning, such that low positive mood and low prediction error encoding resulted in poorer reward learning. These findings provide a mechanistic example of how reduced positive affect moderates reward learning via poorer information encoding in the RewP. Our findings provide a mechanistic example of how mood affects reward learning and information content conveyed in the Reward Positivity. Additionally, our findings challenge the viability of standard mood manipulation procedures for investigating the impact of mood on reward processing and advancing a novel manipulation that is more effective.
One complication of implementing autonomous vehicles (AVs) into society is the formation of trust between the passenger and the vehicle. It has been found that there is a link between emotions and trust-positive emotions such as happiness tend to increase trust, whereas negative emotions such as anger decrease trust (Dunn, 2005). Therefore, there is a potential opportunity to influence user trust by inducing emotional responses in AVs. The purpose of this study is to examine to what extent music is a viable conduit for this process. Prior research has observed a strong connection between music and emotional state. For example, Lau et. al.'s 2012 study assessed cognitive reactivity of formerly depressed and never-depressed participants before and after negative induction (playing sad music while asking the participant to recall a sad memory). It was found that the negative induction led to increased negative automatic thoughts in both groups to a similar extent, showing that there may be a relation between sad music and negative emotion. Of interest in the present study is also the measurement of emotional states. Anttonen and Surakka's (2005) study found an association between emotional stimuli and heart rate. By presenting participants with various positive and negative auditory and visual stimuli, they found that both positive and negative stimuli decelerate heart rate, however negative stimuli do so to a greater extent; this indicates that heart rate can be used to assess the effects of emotional stimuli. Together, these studies provide a basis for assessing and measuring emotional changes induced by positive and negative stimuli. By extending these findings to applications in AVs, this study aims to observe how different stimuli are perceived in an AV interface, which will assist in exploring the most effective ways to increase trust and comfort in AVs.
Recent neuroscience research is beginning to discover the brain regions involved in decision-making under uncertainty, but little is known about whether or how these regions functionally interact with each other. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine both changes in overall activity and changes in functional connectivity during risk-taking. Results showed that choosing high-risk over low-risk decisions was associated with increased activity in both anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices. Connectivity analyses revealed that largely distinct, but somewhat overlapping, cortical and subcortical regions exhibited significant functional connectivity with anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices. Additionally, connectivity with the anterior cingulate in some regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, was modulated by the decision participants chose. These findings (1) elucidate large networks of brain regions that are functionally connected with both anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices during decision-making and (2) demonstrate that the roles of orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices can be functionally differentiated by examining patterns of connectivity. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Motivation and emotion
Summary The aim of this study was to evaluate further the role of the precuneus in episodic memory retrieval. The specific hypothesis addressed was that the precuneus is involved in episodic memory retrieval irrespective of the imagery content. Two groups of six right-handed normal male volunteers took part in the study. Each subject underwent six (15O)butanol-PET scans. In each of the six trials, the memory task began with the injection of a bolus of 1500 MBq of (15O)butanol. For Group 1, 12 word pair
35 right-handed White females (18–35 yrs) viewed positive and stress-inducing motion picture films and then reported on their subjective experience. Spontaneous facial expressions provided accurate information about more specific aspects of emotional experience than just the pleasant vs unpleasant distinction. The facial action coding system (P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen, 1978) isolated a particular type of smile that was related to differences in reported happiness between Ss who showed this action and Ss who did not, to the intensity of happiness, and to which of 2 happy experiences was reported as happiest. Ss who showed a set of facial actions hypothesized to be signs of various negative affects reported experiencing more negative emotion than Ss who did not show these actions. How much these facial actions were shown was related to the reported intensity of negative affect. Specific facial actions associated with the experience of disgust are identified. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Localized amygdalar lesions in humans produce deficits in the recognition of fearful facial expressions. We used functional neuroimaging to test two hypotheses: (i) that the amygdala and some of its functionally connected structures mediate specific neural responses to fearful expressions; (ii) that the early visual processing of emotional faces can be influenced by amygdalar activity. Normal subjects were scanned using PET while they performed a gender discrimination task involving static grey-scale images of faces expressing varying degrees of fear or happiness. In support of the first hypothesis, enhanced activity in the left amygdala, left pulvinar, left anterior insula and bilateral anterior cingulate gyri was observed during the processing of fearful faces. Evidence consistent with the second hypothesis was obtained by a demonstration that amygdalar responses predict expression-specific neural activity in extrastriate cortex.
The use of positron emission tomography to measure regional changes in average blood flow during processing of individual auditory and visual words provides support for multiple, parallel routes between localized sensory-specific, phonological, articulatory and semantic-coding areas.
The amygdala is thought to play a crucial role in emotional and social behaviour. Animal studies implicate the amygdala in both fear conditioning and face perception. In humans, lesions of the amygdala can lead to selective deficits in the recognition of fearful facial expressions and impaired fear conditioning, and direct electrical stimulation evokes fearful emotional responses. Here we report direct in vivo evidence of a differential neural response in the human amygdala to facial expressions of fear and happiness. Positron-emission tomography (PET) measures of neural activity were acquired while subjects viewed photographs of fearful or happy faces, varying systematically in emotional intensity. The neuronal response in the left amygdala was significantly greater to fearful as opposed to happy expressions. Furthermore, this response showed a significant interaction with the intensity of emotion (increasing with increasing fearfulness, decreasing with increasing happiness). The findings provide direct evidence that the human amygdala is engaged in processing the emotional salience of faces, with a specificity of response to fearful facial expressions.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain was used to study whether the amygdala is activated in response to emotional stimuli, even in the absence of explicit knowledge that such stimuli were presented. Pictures of human faces bearing fearful or happy expressions were presented to 10 normal, healthy subjects by using a backward masking procedure that resulted in 8 of 10 subjects reporting that they had not seen these facial expressions. The backward masking procedure consisted of 33 msec presentations of fearful or happy facial expressions, their offset coincident with the onset of 167 msec presentations of neutral facial expressions. Although subjects reported seeing only neutral faces, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal in the amygdala was significantly higher during viewing of masked fearful faces than during the viewing of masked happy faces. This difference was composed of significant signal increases in the amygdala to masked fearful faces as well as significant signal decreases to masked happy faces, consistent with the notion that the level of amygdala activation is affected differentially by the emotional valence of external stimuli. In addition, these facial expressions activated the sublenticular substantia innominata (SI), where signal increases were observed to both fearful and happy faces--suggesting a spatial dissociation of territories that respond to emotional valence versus salience or arousal value. This study, using fMRI in conjunction with masked stimulus presentations, represents an initial step toward determining the role of the amygdala in nonconscious processing.
La littérature philosophique aborde souvent une question importante sur les émotions reliées à la musique: la musique provoque-t-elle des réactions émotives chez ceux qui l’écoutent (la position "émotive") ou exprime-t-elle simplement des émotions que les auditeurs reconnaissent (la position "cognitive"). Pour étudier le phénomène, nous avons enregistré des mesures psychophysiologiques pendant que les sujets écoutaient deux extraits choisis pour représenter trois émotions: la tristesse, (Adagio en sol mineur pour orchestre et cordes d’Albinoni et Adagio pour cordes de Barber), la peur, (Mars —le belliqueux, Les planètes de Holst et Une nuit sur le mont Chauve de Mussorgsky), et la joie (Le printemps, Les quatre saisons de Vivaldi et Midsommarvaka de Alfven). Les mesures comportaient un spectre assez large de fonctions cardiaques, vasculaires, électrodermales et respiratoires. Certains sujets démontraient des changements dynamiques d’émotions en écoutant la musique reliée à l’une des quatre échelles: la tristesse, la peur, la joie et la tension. Tous les jugements physiologiques et émotionnels étaient faits seconde par seconde. Nous avons de plus recueilli des mesures d’auto-évaluation des émotions.
Les attributs de l’émotion étaient continuellement reliés aux extraits qui eux, étaient associés à l’émotion voulue. Les relations entre les sujets se sont avérées très fortes et plusieurs jugements semblables ont pu être constatés sur les deux extraits choisis pour représenter chacune des émotions (la tristesse, la peur et la joie). Le modèle de ces jugements correspond à la représentation circulaire pro-posée pour les émotions qui sont reliées à la musique et celles qui ne le sont pas. De plus, les caractéristiques dynamiques des choix musicaux établissaient clairement les trois types d’extraits. Certains facteurs musicaux étaient les mêmes que dans les études précédentes.
Des changements physiologiques constants se sont produits entre l’intervalle avant la musique et l’intervalle pendant la musique. L’orientation des différences était la même pour tous les types d’extraits, ce qui suggère un modéle général d’écoute de la musique, quelle qu’en soit la qualité d’émotion. De plus, toutes les mesures physiologiques, sauf une, différaient d’un type d’extrait à l’autre. Ces différences ont été confirmées par les corrélations avec les caractéristiques musicales de l’émotion et placées par rapport à des facteurs distincts correspondant aux différents systèmes physiologiques pour l’analyse factorielle. La plupart des changements physiologiques augmentaient au cours du choix musical ou demeuraient à un niveau assez constant. Seules quelques mesures se sont abaissées près des niveaux de base.
Les résultats suggèrent que les émotions reliées à la musique sont reflétées dans les mesures psychophysiologiques et vont à l’encontre de la position cognitive. Ces changements psychophysiques sont des indicateurs de comportement montrant que les sujets éprouvent des émotions en écoutant de la musique. Par contre, si l’on compare ces effets spécifiques avec ceux qui sont associés aux émotions non reliées à la musique, les modèles différent dans certains cas. Les changements physiologiques reliés spécifiquement aux émotions ne correspondaient pas clairement à ceux qui ont été constatés lors des études sur les émotions non reliées à la musique. Certaines constantes ont pu être constatées avec les études précédentes, mais les résultats semblent dépendre du test provoquant l’emotion.
Neural correlates of the often-powerful emotional responses to music are poorly understood. Here we used positron emission tomography to examine cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes related to affective responses to music. Ten volunteers were scanned while listening to six versions of a novel musical passage varying systematically in degree of dissonance. Reciprocal CBF covariations were observed in several distinct paralimbic and neocortical regions as a function of dissonance and of perceived pleasantness/unpleasantness. The findings suggest that music may recruit neural mechanisms similar to those previously associated with pleasant/unpleasant emotional states, but different from those underlying other components of music perception, and other emotions such as fear.
The amygdala appears to play an essential role in many aspects of emotional information processing and behavior. Studies over the past year have begun to clarify the anatomical organization of the amygdala and the contribution of its individual subregions to emotional functions, especially emotional learning and memory. Researchers can now point to plausible circuits involved in the transmission of sensory inputs into the amygdala, between amygdaloid subregions, and to efferent targets in cortical and subcortical regions, for specific emotional learning and memory processes.
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a part of the brain's limbic system. Classically, this region has been related to affect, on the basis of lesion studies in humans and in animals. In the late 1980s, neuroimaging research indicated that ACC was active in many studies of cognition. The findings from EEG studies of a focal area of negativity in scalp electrodes following an error response led to the idea that ACC might be the brain's error detection and correction device. In this article, these various findings are reviewed in relation to the idea that ACC is a part of a circuit involved in a form of attention that serves to regulate both cognitive and emotional processing. Neuroimaging studies showing that separate areas of ACC are involved in cognition and emotion are discussed and related to results showing that the error negativity is influenced by affect and motivation. In addition, the development of the emotional and cognitive roles of ACC are discussed, and how the success of this regulation in controlling responses might be correlated with cingulate size. Finally, some theories are considered about how the different subdivisions of ACC might interact with other cortical structures as a part of the circuits involved in the regulation of mental and emotional activity.
A basic issue about musical emotions concerns whether music elicits emotional responses in listeners (the 'emotivist' position) or simply expresses emotions that listeners recognize in the music (the 'cognitivist' position). To address this, psychophysiological measures were recorded while listeners heard two excerpts chosen to represent each of three emotions: sad, fear, and happy. The measures covered a fairly wide spectrum of cardiac, vascular, electrodermal, and respiratory functions. Other subjects indicated dynamic changes in emotions they experienced while listening to the music on one of four scales: sad, fear, happy, and tension. Both physiological and emotion judgments were made on a second-by-second basis. The physiological measures all showed a significant effect of music compared to the pre-music interval. A number of analyses, including correlations between physiology and emotion judgments, found significant differences among the excerpts. The sad excerpts produced the largest changes in heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance and temperature. The fear excerpts produced the largest changes in blood transit time and amplitude. The happy excerpts produced the largest changes in the measures of respiration. These emotion-specific physiological changes only partially replicated those found for non-musical emotions. The physiological effects of music observed generally support the emotivist view of musical emotions.
Localized amygdalar lesions in humans produce deficits in the recognition of fearful facial expressions. We used functional neuroimaging to test two hypotheses: (i) that the amygdala and some of its functionally connected structures mediate specific neural responses to fearful expressions; (ii) that the early visual processing of emotional faces can be influenced by amygdalar activity. Normal subjects were scanned using PET while they performed a gender discrimination task involving static grey-scale images of faces expressing varying degrees of fear or happiness. In support of the first hypothesis, enhanced activity in the left amygdala, left pulvinar, left anterior insula and bilateral anterior cingulate gyri was observed during the processing of fearful faces. Evidence consistent with the second hypothesis was obtained by a demonstration that amygdalar responses predict expression-specific neural activity in extrastriate cortex.
The difficulties inherent in obtaining consistent and adequate diagnoses for the purposes of research and therapy have been pointed out by a number of authors. Pasamanick12 in a recent article viewed the low interclinician agreement on diagnosis as an indictment of the present state of psychiatry and called for "the development of objective, measurable and verifiable criteria of classification based not on personal or parochial considerations, but on behavioral and other objectively measurable manifestations."Attempts by other investigators to subject clinical observations and judgments to objective measurement have resulted in a wide variety of psychiatric rating scales.4,15 These have been well summarized in a review article by Lorr11 on "Rating Scales and Check Lists for the Evaluation of Psychopathology." In the area of psychological testing, a variety of paper-and-pencil tests have been devised for the purpose of measuring specific
• In two studies of depressed, manic, schizophrenic, and normal subjects, a scale for measuring the intensity of subjects' pleasureable responses to normally enjoyable situations (the Pleasure Scale) evidenced good internal reliability and moderate agreement with the Chapman Anhedonia Scale and indexes of depressive symptom severity. Only the depressed patients showed extremely anhedonic responses. Although more than half the depressed patients evidenced pleasure scores in the normal range, about 18% of them seemed more anhedonic than any normal subject. A mixture analysis resolved depressed patient scores into two distinct distributions: a normal-range distribution (88% of depressives) and an extremely anhedonic distribution (12%). The findings provide some support for the existence of a qualitatively distinct subtype of major depression that has been variously defined as "endogenomorphic" or "melancholic."
Emotion and attention heighten sensitivity to visual cues. How neural activation patterns associated with emotion change as a function of the availability of attentional resources is unknown. We used positron emission tomography (PET) and 15O-water to measure brain activity in male volunteers while they viewed emotional picture sets that could be classified according to valence or arousal. Subjects simultaneously performed a distraction task that manipulated the availability of attentional resources. Twelve scan conditions were generated in a 3 x 2 x 2 factorial design involving three levels of valence (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral), two levels of arousal and two levels of attention (low and high distraction). Extrastriate visual cortical and anterior temporal areas were independently activated by emotional valence, arousal and attention. Common areas of activation derived from a conjunction analysis of these separate activations revealed extensive areas of activation in extrastriate visual cortex with a focus in right BA18 (12, -88, -2) (Z=5.73, P < 0.001 corrected) and right anterior temporal cortex BA38 (42, 14, -30) (Z=4.03, P < 0.05 corrected). These findings support an hypothesis that emotion and attention modulate both early and late stages of visual processing.
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin's second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the first printing of the first edition (1871), not previously available in paperback. The work is divided into two parts. Part One marshals behavioral and morphological evidence to argue that humans evolved from other animals. Darwin shoes that human mental and emotional capacities, far from making human beings unique, are evidence of an animal origin and evolutionary development. Part Two is an extended discussion of the differences between the sexes of many species and how they arose as a result of selection. Here Darwin lays the foundation for much contemporary research by arguing that many characteristics of animals have evolved not in response to the selective pressures exerted by their physical and biological environment, but rather to confer an advantage in sexual competition. These two themes are drawn together in two final chapters on the role of sexual selection in humans. In their Introduction, Professors Bonner and May discuss the place of The Descent in its own time and relation to current work in biology and other disciplines.
Background: Oculomotor abnormalities have been frequently observed in schizophrenic patients and their first degree relatives. Especially the inability to suppress reflexive saccades has been proposed as a potential vulnerability marker for schizophrenia. However, the functional brain abnormalities underlying this disinhibition of automatic saccades remain largely unknown. This study investigates this abnormality using a novel functional brain measure of saccadic inhibition containing two changes compared to prevous research. Firstly, the subtraction of task conditions is aimed selectively at detecting brainregions involved in inhibition. Previous studies mainly used an antisaccades vs prosaccades paradigm, which does not control for visuo-spatial aspects of antisaccades [1]. Secondly, the new technique of Event Related fMRI makes it possible to avoid possible disturbing effects of the saccade which returns the gaze to central view after each trial. An EOG experiment with an identical task was incorporated to measure performance.
Describes emotional reactions that occur in particularly strong experiences of music, further exploring which factors can elicit such reactions. First is a brief review of research on strong experiences followed by a description of a research project on strong experiences of music, an associated analysis of emotional reactions, and a discussion on the above. Although evidence from reviewed studies suggests that music may be a common trigger of extraordinary experiences, the author created the strong experiences of music (SEM) project to address the most basic question regarding music: how are we affected by music? Experimenters asked Ss to describe, in detail, "the strongest, most intense experience of music that you have ever had' and administered related follow-up questions. All participation was voluntary, however attempts were made to ensure variation with regard to gender, age, occupation, and musical preference. 60 percent of Ss were between the ages of 20 and 40 yrs and 30 percent were between 40 and 60 yrs. In the reports, the author found numerous examples of "basic' emotions, most of which were positive, and concluded that music is one of the most effective triggers of strong emotional experiences as confirmed by the studies reviewed in this chapter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Cortical projections to subdivisions of the cingulate cortex in the rhesus monkey were analyzed with horseradish peroxidase and tritiated amino acid tracers. These projections were evaluated in terms of an expanded cytoarchitectural scheme in which areas 24 and 23 were divided into three ventrodorsal parts, i.e., areas 24a–c and 23a–c.
Most cortical input to area 25 originated in the frontal lobe in lateral areas 46 and 9 and orbitofrontal areas 11 and 14. Area 25 also received afferents from cingulate areas 24b, 24c, and 23b, from rostral auditory association areas TS2 and TS3, from the subiculum and CA1 sector of the hippocampus, and from the lateral and accessory basal nuclei of the amygdala (LB and AB, respectively).
Areas 24a and 24b received afferents from areas 25 and 23b of cingulate cortex, but most were from frontal and temporal cortices. These included the following areas: frontal areas 9, 11, 12, 13, and 46; temporal polar area TG as well as LB and AB; superior temporal sulcus area TPO; agranular insular cortex; posterior parahippocampal cortex including areas TF, TL, and TH and the subiculum. Autoradiographic cases indicated that area 24c received input from the insula, parietal areas PG and PGm, area TG of the temporal pole, and frontal areas 12 and 46, Additionally, caudal area 24 was the recipient of area PG input but not amygdalar afferents. It was also the primary site of areas TF, TL, and TH projections.
The following projections were observed both to and within posterior cingulate cortex. Area 29a–c received inputs from area 46 of the frontal lobe and the subiculum and in turn it projected to area 30. Area 30 had afferents from the posterior parietal cortex (area Opt) and temporal area TF. Areas 23a and 23b received inputs mainly from frontal areas 46, 9, 11, and 14, parietal areas Opt and PGm, area TPO of superior temporal cortex, and areas TH, TL, and TF. Anterior cingulate areas 24a and 24b and posterior areas 29d and 30 projected to area 23. Finally, a rostromedial part of visual association area 19 also projected to area 23.
The origin and termination of these connections were expressed in a number of different laminar patterns. Most corticocortical connections arose in layer III and to a lesser extent layer V, while others, e.g., those from the cortex of the superior temporal sulcus, had an equal density of cells in both layers III and V. In one instance projections to area 24 arose almost entirely from layer V of areas TH, TL, and TF. Furthermore, although most projections terminated in layers I–III of cingulate cortex, those of the amygdala to rostral area 24 terminated in deep layer I and layer II while area Opt projections to area 23 terminated mainly in layers I, II, and IV.
Four classes of cortical connections have been characterized and each may play a role in the sensorimotor functions of cingulate cortex. These include connections with sensory association and multimodal areas, projections to and from premotor area 24c, subicular termination in areas 25, 24, and 29, and intracingulate connections that may transmit sensory input to areas 24 and 23 into area 24c.
Emotion and attention heighten sensitivity to visual cues. How neural activation patterns associated with emotion change as a function of the availability of attentional resources is unknown. We used positron emission tomography (PET) and 15O-water to measure brain activity in male volunteers while they viewed emotional picture sets that could be classified according to valence or arousal. Subjects simultaneously performed a distraction task that manipulated the availability of attentional resources. Twelve scan conditions were generated in a 3×2×2 factorial design involving three levels of valence (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral), two levels of arousal and two levels of attention (low and high distraction).Extrastriate visual cortical and anterior temporal areas were independently activated by emotional valence, arousal and attention. Common areas of activation derived from a conjunction analysis of these separate activations revealed extensive areas of activation in extrastriate visual cortex with a focus in right BA18 (12, −88, −2) (Z=5.73, P<0.001 corrected) and right anterior temporal cortex BA38 (42, 14, −30) (Z=4.03, P<0.05 corrected). These findings support an hypothesis that emotion and attention modulate both early and late stages of visual processing.
An analytic criterion for rotation is defined. The scientific advantage of analytic criteria over subjective (graphical) rotational procedures is discussed. Carroll's criterion and the quartimax criterion are briefly reviewed; the varimax criterion is outlined in detail and contrasted both logically and numerically with the quartimax criterion. It is shown that thenormal varimax solution probably coincides closely to the application of the principle of simple structure. However, it is proposed that the ultimate criterion of a rotational procedure is factorial invariance, not simple structure—although the two notions appear to be highly related. The normal varimax criterion is shown to be a two-dimensional generalization of the classic Spearman case, i.e., it shows perfect factorial invariance for two pure clusters. An example is given of the invariance of a normal varimax solution for more than two factors. The oblique normal varimax criterion is stated. A computational outline for the orthogonal normal varimax is appended.
The amygdala appears to play an essential role in many aspects of emotional information processing and behavior. Studies over the past year have begun to clarify the anatomical organization of the amygdala and the contribution of its individual subregions to emotional functions, especially emotional learning and memory. Researchers can now point to plausible circuits involved in the transmission of sensory inputs into the amygdala, between amygdaloid subregions, and to efferent targets in cortical and subcortical regions, for specific emotional learning and memory processes.
Reliability is defined as the degree to which multiple assessments of a subject agree (reproducibility). There is increasing
awareness among researchers that the two most appropriate measures of reliability are the intraclass correlation coefficient
and kappa. However, unacceptable statistical measures of reliability such as chi-square, percent agreement, product moment
correlation, as well as any measure of association and Yule's Y still appear in the literature. There are costs associated with improper measurements, unreliable diagnostic systems, inappropriate
statistics and measures of reliability, and poor quality research. Costs are incurred when misleading information directs
resources and talents into nonproductive avenues of research. The consequences of unreliable measurements and diagnosis are
illustrated with some studies of schizophrenia.
1. This study investigates the behavioral conditions in which dopamine (DA) neurons of substantia nigra and adjoining areas A8 and A10 respond with impulses to visual and auditory trigger stimuli eliciting immediate arm- and eye-movement reactions. 2. In a formal task, the rapid opening of the door of a small, food-containing box located at eye level ahead of the animal served as visible and audible trigger stimulus. Most DA neurons on the contralateral side responded to this stimulus with a short burst of impulses with median onset latency of 50 ms and duration of 90 ms (75% of 164 neurons). Similar responses were seen in a comparable fraction of DA neurons during ipsilateral task performance, suggesting that responses were not specific for the limb being used. 3. When the sensory components of the door opening stimulus were separated, DA neurons typically responded in a similar manner to the moving visual stimulus of the opening door, the low-intensity sliding noise of the opening door, and the 1-kHz sound of 90-92 dB intensity emitted from a distant source at the onset of door opening. Responses to each component alone were lower in magnitude than to all three together. 4. In a variation of the task, a neighboring, identical food box opened in random alternation with the other box but without permitting animals to reach out (asymmetric, direct-reaction go/no-go task). With each sensory component, DA neurons typically responded both to opening of go and no-go boxes. Responses were enhanced when stimuli elicited limb movements in go trials. 5. Monkeys reacted to door opening with target-directed saccadic eye movements in the majority of both go and no-go trials. Neuronal responses were equally present during the occasional absence of eye movements. Thus responses were not specific for the initiation of individual arm or eye movements. 6. Neuronal responses were absent when the same stimuli occurred outside of the behavioral task with target-direct arm and eye movements lacking. This shows that responses were not of purely sensory nature but were related to the capacity of the stimulus for eliciting behavioral reactions. 7. In a variation of the go/no-go task, an instruction light illuminated 2-3 s before door opening prepared the animal to perform the reaching movement on door opening or to refrain from moving (asymmetric, instruction-dependent go/no-go task).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
The cytoarchitecture and thalamic afferents of cingulate cortex were evaluated in the rhesus monkey ( Macaca mulatto ). Area 24 has three divisions of which area 24a is adjacent to the callosal sulcus and has the least laminar differentiation. Area 24b has more clearly defined layers II, III, and Va, and area 24c, which forms the lower bank of the anterior cingulate sulcus, has a particularly dense layer III. Area 23 also has three divisions, each of which has a distinct layer IV. Area 23a is adjacent to the callosal sulcus and has the thinnest layers II–IV, which have the same cell density as layers V and VI. Area 23b has the largest pyramids in layers IIIc and Va, and area 23c, in the depths of the posterior cingulate sulcus, has the broadest external and thinnest internal pyramidal layers. Finally, areas 29 and 30 are located in the posterior depths of the callosal sulcus. Two divisions of area 29 are apparent: one with a granular layer directly adjacent to layer I (area 29a–c) and another with differentiation of layers III and IV (area 29d). Area 30 has a dysgranular layer IV.
Injections of the retrograde tracer horseradish peroxidase (HRP) were made into subdivisions of cingulate cortex in the monkey. Area 25 received thalamic input mainly from the midline parataenial (Pt), central densocellular (Cdc), and reuniens nuclei as well as from the dorsal parvicellular division of the mediodorsal nucleus (MDpc). A less dense projection also originated in the intralaminar parafascicular (Pf), central superior, and limitans (Li) nuclei as well as the medial division of the anterior nuclei (AM).
Areas 24a and 24b received most thalamic afferents from fusiform and multipolar cells in the Cdc and Pf nuclei with fewer from the ventral anterior (VA) and MDpc and MD densocellular (MDdc) nuclei and only minor input from AM. Most input to premotor cingulate area 24c appeared to originate in VA, MDdc, and Li.
Area 29 received the most dense input from nuclei traditionally associated with limbic cortex including the anteroventral (AV), anterodorsal (AD), and laterodorsal (LD) nuclei. Areas 23a and 23b, in contrast, did not receive AV, AD, or LD input, but the greatest proportion of their thalamic afferents arose in AM. Less‐pronounced input also came from the lateroposterior (LP), medial pulvinar, and MDdc nuclei. This latter nucleus projected more to area 23b than to areas 30 or 23a.
Anterior medial nucleus efferents to cingulate cortex were of particular note for two reasons. First, AM projected primarily to posterior cingulate areas with area 23 receiving its principal thalamic input from AM. Second, projections to areas 30, 23a, and 23b were topographically organized with ventral areas 30 and 23a receiving from the central core of AM. While the more dorsally located area 23b received input from peripheral and medial.
In light of the extensive projections of Cds, Csl, and Pf to anterior cingulate cortex, it is proposed that the midline and intralaminar thalamic nuclie be classified as part of limbic thalamus along with the anterior, LD, and MD nuclei. Furthermore, although AM projects mainly to posterior cingulate cortex, it also has light projections to area 25 and minor input to area 24. As suhc, AM is the only limbic thalamic nucleus that has such widespread projections to cingulate cortex. Finally, visually evoked activity in area 23 may be the result of projections from the LP and medial pulvinar.
In two studies of depressed, manic, schizophrenic, and normal subjects, a scale for measuring the intensity of subjects' pleasureable responses to normally emjoyable situations (the Pleasure Scale) evidenced good internal reliability and moderate agreement with the Chapman Anhedonia Scale and Indexes of depressive symptom severity. Only the depressed patients showed extremely anhedonic responses. Although more than half the depressed patients evidenced pleasure scores in the normal range, about 185 of them seemed more anhedonic than any norma subject. A mixture analysis resolved depressed patient scores into two distinct distributions: a normal-range distribution (88% of depressives) and an extremely anhedonic distribution (12%). The findings provide some support for the existence of a qualitatively distinct subtype of major depression that has been variously defined an "endogenomorphic" or "melancholic."
The specific brain regions involved in the normal emotional states of transient sadness or happiness are poorly understood. The authors therefore sought to determine if H2(15)O positron emission tomography (PET) might demonstrate changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) associated with transient sadness or happiness in healthy adult women.
Eleven healthy and never mentally ill adult women were scanned, by using PET and H2(15)O, during happy, sad, and neutral states induced by recalling affect-appropriate life events and looking at happy, sad, or neutral human faces.
Compared to the neutral condition, transient sadness significantly activated bilateral limbic and paralimbic structures (cingulate, medial prefrontal, and mesial temporal cortex), as well as brainstem, thalamus, and caudate/putamen. In contrast, transient happiness had no areas of significantly increased activity but was associated with significant and widespread reductions in cortical rCBF, especially in the right prefrontal and bilateral temporal-parietal regions.
Transient sadness and happiness in healthy volunteer women are accompanied by significant changes in regional brain activity in the limbic system, as well as other brain regions. Transient sadness and happiness affect different brain regions in divergent directions and are not merely opposite activity in identical brain regions. These findings have implications for understanding the neural substrates of both normal and pathological emotion.
1. Two experiments were aimed at investigating the functional organization of the human anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in relation to higher-order motor control. 2. The 15O-labeled H2O bolus method was used to measure relative changes of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in 18 healthy human subjects as they performed oculomotor, manual, or speech tasks. 3. Task-specific rCBF changes were obtained in distinct subregions of the ACC, depending on the output system employed. The oculomotor and the manual task-related foci were found in the rostral and caudal regions of the ACC, respectively, whereas the speech foci were localized within two cingulate subregions, the intermediate dorsal and the rostral ACC. 4. In the manual tasks, two groups of activation foci could be distinguished, one just behind and the other just in front of the vertical plane traversing the anterior commissure. 5. The above pattern of rCBF changes was observed only if there was concomitant activation within the lateral prefrontal cortex (except for the posterior group of foci obtained in the manual tasks). 6. The localization of output-specific rCBF changes within the human ACC is consistent with the known somatotopic organization of the cingulate cortex in the monkey. 7. It is tentatively proposed that the ACC participates in motor control by facilitating the execution of the appropriate responses and/or suppressing the execution of the inappropriate ones. Such a modulatory effect would be of particular importance when behavior has to be modified in new and challenging situations.
In vivo microdialysis was used to monitor extracellular concentrations of dopamine (DA), and its metabolites dihydroxyphenylacetic acid (DOPAC) and homovanillic acid (HVA) in the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum of sexually active female rats during tests of locomotor activity, exposure to a novel chamber, exposure to sex odors, the presentation of a sexually active male rat, and copulation. DA increased slightly but significantly in the nucleus accumbens when a sexually active male was placed behind a wire-mesh screen, and further during copulation. DA also increased significantly in the dorsal striatum during copulation; however, the magnitude of this effect was significantly lower than that observed in the nucleus accumbens. The metabolites DOPAC and HVA generally followed DA with a delay, and increased significantly during copulation in both regions. In contrast, forced locomotion on a rotating drum, exposure to a novel testing chamber, and exposure to sex odors did not increase DA significantly in either region, although forced locomotion increased DOPAC significantly in both regions, and HVA significantly in the nucleus accumbens. The magnitude of DA release in the nucleus accumbens was significantly greater during copulation than running, whereas no significant difference was detected for striatal DA release between these two behavioral conditions. These results indicate that novelty or locomotor activity alone do not account for the increase in DA observed in the nucleus accumbens of female rats during copulation, and suggest that DA transmission in the nucleus accumbens is associated with anticipatory and consummatory aspects of sexual activity, as it is in male rats. In the dorsal striatum, however, DA release during copulation may reflect an increase in locomotor activity associated with active pacing of the male.
We measured amygdala activity in human volunteers during rapid visual presentations of fearful, happy, and neutral faces using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The first experiment involved a fixed order of conditions both within and across runs, while the second one used a fully counterbalanced order in addition to a low level baseline of simple visual stimuli. In both experiments, the amygdala was preferentially activated in response to fearful versus neutral faces. In the counterbalanced experiment, the amygdala also responded preferentially to happy versus neutral faces, suggesting a possible generalized response to emotionally valenced stimuli. Rapid habituation effects were prominent in both experiments. Thus, the human amygdala responds preferentially to emotionally valenced faces and rapidly habituates to them.
We investigated brain circuitry mediating cocaine-induced euphoria and craving using functional MRI (fMRI). During double-blind cocaine (0.6 mg/kg) and saline infusions in cocaine-dependent subjects, the entire brain was imaged for 5 min before and 13 min after infusion while subjects rated scales for rush, high, low, and craving. Cocaine induced focal signal increases in nucleus accumbens/subcallosal cortex (NAc/SCC), caudate, putamen, basal forebrain, thalamus, insula, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, cingulate, lateral prefrontal and temporal cortices, parietal cortex, striate/extrastriate cortices, ventral tegmentum, and pons and produced signal decreases in amygdala, temporal pole, and medial frontal cortex. Saline produced few positive or negative activations, which were localized to lateral prefrontal cortex and temporo-occipital cortex. Subjects who underwent repeat studies showed good replication of the regional fMRI activation pattern following cocaine and saline infusions, with activations on saline retest that might reflect expectancy. Brain regions that exhibited early and short duration signal maxima showed a higher correlation with rush ratings. These included the ventral tegmentum, pons, basal forebrain, caudate, cingulate, and most regions of lateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, regions that demonstrated early but sustained signal maxima were more correlated with craving than with rush ratings; such regions included the NAc/SCC, right parahippocampal gyrus, and some regions of lateral prefrontal cortex. Sustained negative signal change was noted in the amygdala, which correlated with craving ratings. Our data demonstrate the ability of fMRI to map dynamic patterns of brain activation following cocaine infusion in cocaine-dependent subjects and provide evidence of dynamically changing brain networks associated with cocaine-induced euphoria and cocaine-induced craving.
We examined brain activity associated with visual imagery at episodic memory retrieval using positron emission tomography (PET). Twelve measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were taken in six right-handed, healthy, male volunteers. During six measurements, they were engaged in the cued recall of imageable verbal paired associates. During the other six measurements, they recalled nonimageable paired associates. Memory performance was equalized across all word lists. The subjects' use of an increased degree of visual imagery during the recall of imageable paired associates was confirmed using subjective rating scales after each scan. Memory-related imagery was associated with significant activation of a medial parietal area, the precuneus. This finding confirms a previously stated hypothesis about the precuneus and provides strong evidence that it is a key part of the neural substate of visual imagery occurring in conscious memory recall.
Substantial evidence suggests that a key distinction in the classification of human emotion is that between an appetitive motivational system association with positive or pleasant emotion and an aversive motivational system associated with negative or unpleasant emotion. To explore the neural substrates of these two systems, 12 healthy women viewed sets of pictures previously demonstrated to elicit pleasant, unpleasant and neutral emotion, while positron emission tomographic (PET) measurements of regional cerebral blood flow were obtained. Pleasant and unpleasant emotions were each distinguished from neutral emotion conditions by significantly increased cerebral blood flow in the vicinity of the medial prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area 9), thalamus, hypothalamus and midbrain (P < 0.005). Unpleasant was distinguished from neutral or pleasant emotion by activation of the bilateral occipito-temporal cortex and cerebellum, and left parahippocampal gyrus, hippocampus and amygdala (P < 0.005). Pleasant was also distinguished from neutral but not unpleasant emotion by activation of the head of the left caudate nucleus (P < 0.005). These findings are consistent with those from other recent PET studies of human emotion and demonstrate that there are both common and unique components of the neural networks mediating pleasant and unpleasant emotion in healthy women.
Medial temporal brain regions such as the hippocampal formation and parahippocampal cortex have been generally implicated in navigation and visual memory. However, the specific function of each of these regions is not yet clear. Here we present evidence that a particular area within human parahippocampal cortex is involved in a critical component of navigation: perceiving the local visual environment. This region, which we name the 'parahippocampal place area' (PPA), responds selectively and automatically in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to passively viewed scenes, but only weakly to single objects and not at all to faces. The critical factor for this activation appears to be the presence in the stimulus of information about the layout of local space. The response in the PPA to scenes with spatial layout but no discrete objects (empty rooms) is as strong as the response to complex meaningful scenes containing multiple objects (the same rooms furnished) and over twice as strong as the response to arrays of multiple objects without three-dimensional spatial context (the furniture from these rooms on a blank background). This response is reduced if the surfaces in the scene are rearranged so that they no longer define a coherent space. We propose that the PPA represents places by encoding the geometry of the local environment.
This study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emotional responses to music in the context of severe deficits in music processing after brain damage in a non-musician. Six experiments were designed to explore the perceptual basis of emotional judgments in music. In each experiment, the same set of 32 excerpts taken from the classical repertoire and intended to convey a happy or sad tone were presented under various transformations and with different task demands. In Expts. 1 to 3, subjects were required to judge on a 10-point scale whether the excerpts were happy or sad. Altogether the results show that emotional judgments are (a) highly consistent across subjects and resistant to brain damage; (b) determined by musical structure (mode and tempo); and (c) immediate. Experiments 4 to 6 were designed to asses whether emotional and non-emotional judgments reflect the operations of a single perceptual analysis system. To this aim, we searched for evidence of dissociation in our brain-damaged patient, I.R., by using tasks that do not require emotional interpretation. These non-emotional tasks were a 'same-different' classification task (Expt. 4), error detection tasks (Expt. 5A,B) and a change monitoring task (Expt. 6). I.R. was impaired in these non-emotional tasks except when the change affected the mode and the tempo of the excerpt, in which case I.R. performed close to normal. The results are discussed in relation to the possibility that emotional and non-emotional judgments are the products of distinct pathways.
We investigated facial recognition memory (for previously unfamiliar faces) and facial expression perception with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Eight healthy, right-handed volunteers participated. For the facial recognition task, subjects made a decision as to the familiarity of each of 50 faces (25 previously viewed; 25 novel). We detected signal increase in the right middle temporal gyrus and left prefrontal cortex during presentation of familiar faces, and in several brain regions, including bilateral posterior cingulate gyri, bilateral insulae and right middle occipital cortex during presentation of unfamiliar faces. Standard facial expressions of emotion were used as stimuli in two further tasks of facial expression perception. In the first task, subjects were presented with alternating happy and neutral faces; in the second task, subjects were presented with alternating sad and neutral faces. During presentation of happy facial expressions, we detected a signal increase predominantly in the left anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral posterior cingulate gyri, medial frontal cortex and right supramarginal gyrus, brain regions previously implicated in visuospatial and emotion processing tasks. No brain regions showed increased signal intensity during presentation of sad facial expressions. These results provide evidence for a distinction between the neural correlates of facial recognition memory and perception of facial expression but, whilst highlighting the role of limbic structures in perception of happy facial expressions, do not allow the mapping of a distinct neural substrate for perception of sad facial expressions.