A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical music

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.

Neural processing of criticism and positive comments from relatives in individuals with schizotypal personality traits

“…Our fi ndings suggest reduced capacity of the HS group to elevate mood in response to reward, which is consistent with fi ndings that high anhedonia in healthy populations is associated with lower reward-related neural responsivity (Harvey et al 2007(Harvey et al , 2010. Some of these regions are normally activated when healthy participants are presented with positively valenced stimuli (Hamann and Mao 2002;Mitterschiffthaler et al 2007;Colibazzi et al 2010), while the left middle frontal gyrus (BA9) is activated during positive regulation of emotions in response to …”

“…In contrast, response to positively valenced material may engage dopaminergic reward areas, such as the striatum. Dorsal and ventral striatum have been reported to be activated when viewing positive words (Hamann and Mao 2002), ventral striatum when listening to pleasant music (Mitterschiffthaler et al 2007), and ventral striatum and midbrain when viewing pleasant statements (Colibazzi et al 2010) in healthy participants.…”

Positive emotion broadens attention focus through decreased position-specific spatial encoding in early visual cortex: Evidence from ERPs

“…1 These music samples had been validated in previous research (Bower & Mayer, 1989;Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, 2007).…”

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

“…On the other hand, the stability for happiness might be related with the relative preservation of the basal ganglia with increasing age. The basal ganglia are known to subserve the processing of happiness and it is also known that they undergo little decline with age (e.g., for musical stimuli, see Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, 2007;for other modalities: Calder et al, 2003;Pell & Leonard, 2003;Phan et al, 2002;Williams et al, 2006). Regarding the stability for peacefulness,…”