Music-induced changes in functional cerebral asymmetries

Abstract

Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractAfter decades of research, it remains unclear whether emotion lateralization occurs because one hemisphere is dominant for processing the emotional content of the stimuli, or whether emotional stimuli activate lateralised networks associated with the subjective emotional experience. By using emotion-induction procedures, we investigated the effect of listening to happy and sad music on three well-established lateralization tasks. In a prestudy, Mozart's piano sonata (K.448) and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata were rated as the most happy and sad excerpts, respectively. Participants listened to either one emotional excerpt, or sat in silence before completing an emotional chimeric faces task (Experiment 1), visual line bisection task (Experiment 2) and a dichotic listening task (Experiment 3 and 4). Listening to happy music resulted in a reduced right hemispheric bias in facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) and visuospatial attention (Experiment 2) and increased left hemispheric bias in language lateralization (Experiment 3 and 4). Although Experiment 1-3 revealed an increased positive emotional state after listening to happy music, mediation analyses revealed that the effect on hemispheric asymmetries was not mediated by music-induced emotional changes. The direct effect of music listening on lateralization was investigated in Experiment 4 in which tempo of the happy excerpt was manipulated by controlling for other acoustic features. However, the results of Experiment 4 made it rather unlikely that tempo is the critical cue accounting for the effects. We conclude that listening to music can affect functional cerebral asymmetries in well-established emotional and cognitive laterality tasks, independent of music-induced changes in the emotion state.

Emotional Responses to Music: Shifts in Frontal Brain Asymmetry Mark Periods of Musical Change

“…The demonstration of these effects in the FC3/FC4 site is consistent with previous findings ( Davidson et al, 1990 ; Jackson et al, 2003 ; Travis and Arenander, 2006 ; Kline and Allen, 2008 ; Dennis and Solomon, 2010 ), although meaningful findings are also commonly obtained from data collected from the F3/F4 site (see Schmidt and Trainor, 2001 ; Thibodeau et al, 2006 ), which was not observed in the current study. The asymmetry findings also verify findings observed in response to positive and negative emotion induction by music ( Schmidt and Trainor, 2001 ; Altenmüller et al, 2002 ; Flores-Gutierrez et al, 2007 ; Hausmann et al, 2013 ). Importantly, no significant FA effect was observed in the control P3/P4 sites, which is an area not implicated in emotional responding.…”

“…The pattern of data in these studies suggests that this frontal lateralization is mediated by the emotions induced by the music, rather than just the emotional valence they perceive in the music. Hausmann et al (2013) provided support for this conclusion via mood induction through a musical procedure using happy or sad music, which reduced the right lateralization bias typically observed for emotional faces and visual tasks, and increased the left lateralization bias typically observed for language tasks. A right FA pattern associated with depression was found to be shifted by a music intervention (listening to 15 min of ‘uplifting’ popular music previously selected by another group of adolescents) in a group of adolescents ( Jones and Field, 1999 ).…”

Language lateralisation measured across linguistic and national boundaries

“…For example, although language lateralisation has been assumed to be a trait characteristic of the human brain, several studies found developmental changes in the degree and sometimes even the direction of the RVF/LH language advantage (e.g., Bishop, 2013). Even in adults, it has been shown that the LVF/RH advantage in verbal VHF tasks can change within relatively short-term intervals (e.g., Hausmann et al, 2002;Hausmann, Hodgetts, & Eerola, 2016;Mohr, Michel, et al, 2005), which might explain some of the observed intra-and inter-individual differences in language lateralisation.…”

Investigating real-life emotions in romantic couples: a mobile EEG study

“…A potential reason for this heterogeneity in the literature might be the lack of ecological validity in emotion research as the most prevalent method of positive or negative emotional induction is via movies, pictures or music (e.g. Gross & Levenson, 1995;Hausmann, Hodgetts, & Eerola, 2016;Hewig et al, 2005;Uhrig et al, 2016). Thus, emotions are largely only perceived during experimental paradigms.…”