Investigating emotion with music: an fMRI study

Abstract

The present study used pleasant and unpleasant music to evoke emotion and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine neural correlates of emotion processing. Unpleasant (permanently dissonant) music contrasted with pleasant (consonant) music showed activations of amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and temporal poles. These structures have previously been implicated in the emotional processing of stimuli with (negative) emotional valence; the present data show that a cerebral network comprising these structures can be activated during the perception of auditory (musical) information. Pleasant (contrasted to unpleasant) music showed activations of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, inferior Brodmann's area (BA) 44, BA 45, and BA 46), the anterior superior insula, the ventral striatum, Heschl's gyrus, and the Rolandic operculum. IFG activations appear to reflect processes of music-syntactic analysis and working memory operations. Activations of Rolandic opercular areas possibly reflect the activation of mirror-function mechanisms during the perception of the pleasant tunes. Rolandic operculum, anterior superior insula, and ventral striatum may form a motor-related circuitry that serves the formation of (premotor) representations for vocal sound production during the perception of pleasant auditory information. In all of the mentioned structures, except the hippocampus, activations increased over time during the presentation of the musical stimuli, indicating that the effects of emotion processing have temporal dynamics; the temporal dynamics of emotion have so far mainly been neglected in the functional imaging literature.

Figure 1

Activations elicited during the presentation of unpleasant (contrasted to pleasant) music (t‐maps), separately for entire excerpts (A), and for the second block of excerpts only (B, see Subjects and Methods for details). The t‐maps were thresholded using an error probability of P = 0.001 (corrected for multiple comparisons). Unpleasant music activated the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus, the temporal poles, and the amygdala.

Figure 3

Percent signal change of trial‐averaged fMRI signals within the structures reported in Tables I and II; fMRI signals were computed for the voxels used for the ROI analyses (see Subjects and Methods), and averaged for all four conditions (first and second block of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli). AL/AR: left/right amygdala, PL/PR: left/right parahippocampal gyrus, TL/TR: left/right temporal pole, VSL/VSR: left/right ventral striatum, HIL/HIR: left/right hippocampus, HL/HR: left/right gyrus of Heschl, IL/IR: left/right insula, RL/RR: left/right Rolandic operculum.

Figure 2

Activations elicited during the presentation of pleasant (contrasted to unpleasant) music (t‐maps), separately for entire excerpts (A), and for the second block of excerpts only (B,C). The t‐maps were thresholded using an error probability of P = 0.001 (corrected for multiple comparisons). Pleasant music activated Heschl's gyri, the IFG (BA 45 and 46), as well as the left anterior superior insula during both halves, and additionally Rolandic and frontal opercular areas (inferior BA 44) during the second block.