Neural correlates of cross-modal affective priming by music in Williams syndrome

Abstract

Emotional connection is the main reason people engage with music, and the emotional features of music can influence processing in other domains. Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder where musicality and sociability are prominent aspects of the phenotype. This study examined oscillatory brain activity during a musical affective priming paradigm. Participants with WS and age-matched typically developing controls heard brief emotional musical excerpts or emotionally neutral sounds and then reported the emotional valence (happy/sad) of subsequently presented faces. Participants with WS demonstrated greater evoked fronto-central alpha activity to the happy vs sad musical excerpts. The size of these alpha effects correlated with parent-reported emotional reactivity to music. Although participant groups did not differ in accuracy of identifying facial emotions, reaction time data revealed a music priming effect only in persons with WS, who responded faster when the face matched the emotional valence of the preceding musical excerpt vs when the valence differed. Matching emotional valence was also associated with greater evoked gamma activity thought to reflect cross-modal integration. This effect was not present in controls. The results suggest a specific connection between music and socioemotional processing and have implications for clinical and educational approaches for WS.

Keywords: EEG; Williams syndrome; emotion; music.

Fig. 1

Cross-modal affective priming procedure.

Fig. 2

Reaction time to facial targets in WS and TD groups. Although TD individuals did not differ in their reaction time across conditions, individuals with WS responded significantly faster when the emotion of the musical prime and face target matched than when they mismatched [t(12) = −2.975, P = 0.012]. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01.

Fig. 3

Differences in evoked alpha (8–12 Hz) power in response to happy (top) vs neutral (bottom) auditory primes in (A) WS and (B) TD groups. Electrodes belonging to the significant clusters at the time point indicated in each topographic plot (right) are represented with asterisks, and overlay activity for the data used in the contrast. The scale is the percent change from baseline (i.e. normalized power). Time-frequency representations (left) were generated by averaging together all of the electrodes belonging to the significant cluster; the same power scale applies to both topographic plots and TFRs. In both WS and TD groups, a large cluster of frontal-central electrodes showed greater early evoked alpha power during the happy music vs neutral sound (WS: 0–236 ms, P = 0.004; TD: 4–288 ms, P = 0.02).

Fig. 4

Differences in evoked alpha (8–12 Hz) power in response to happy (top) vs sad (bottom) auditory primes in (A) WS and (B) TD groups. In the WS group only, there was a significant cluster of frontal-central electrodes that showed greater evoked alpha power during the happy vs sad musical primes (P = 0.03) from 0 to 452 ms. There were no significant clusters in the TD group. See legend of Figure 3 for explanation of plotting.

Fig. 5

Differences in evoked gamma (26–45 Hz) power to the facial targets in the match (top) vs mismatch (bottom) conditions in the (A) WS and (B) TD groups. In the WS group only, there were two consecutive bursts of greater evoked gamma power to the face targets that matched the valence of the auditory primes than to those that mismatched the valence of the auditory primes, with a frontal-central distribution from 144 to 516 ms (P = 0.001). There were no significant clusters in the TD group. See legend of Figure 3 for explanation of plotting.