Music listening is highly pleasurable and important part of most people's lives. Because music has no obvious importance for survival, the ubiquity of music remains puzzling and the brain processes underlying this attraction to music are not well understood. Like other rewards (such as food, sex, and money), pleasurable music activates structures in the dopaminergic reward system, but how music manages to tap into the brain's reward system is less clear. Here we propose a novel framework for understanding musical pleasure, suggesting that music conforms to the recent concept of pleasure cycles with phases of "wanting/expectation," "liking," and "learning." We argue that expectation is fundamental to musical pleasure, and that music can be experienced as pleasurable both when it fulfills and violates expectations. Dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain represent expectations and violations of expectations (prediction errors) in response to "rewards'" and "alert/incentive salience signals." We argue that the human brain treats music as an alert/incentive salience signal, and suggest that the activity of dopamine neurons represents aspects of the phases of musical expectation and musical learning, but not directly the phase of music liking. Finally, we propose a computational model for understanding musical anticipation and pleasure operationalized through the recent theory of predictive coding.

Major US studies reveal extensive comorbidity of PG with other mental illnesses. The BBGS features psychometric advantages for health care providers that should encourage clinicians and epidemiologists to consider current PG along with other problems. The BBGS is practical for clinical application because it uses only 3 items and they are easy to ask, answer, and include in all modes of interviewing, including self-administered surveys. The BBGS has a strong theoretical foundation because it includes 1 item from each of the addiction syndrome 3 domains: neuroadaptation (for example, withdrawal); psychosocial characteristics (for example, lying); and adverse social consequences of gambling (for example, obtaining money from others).

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with prior perceptual knowledge. Within this framework, perceptual differences may occur because of enhanced precision in how sensory evidence is represented or because sensory evidence is weighted much higher than prior perceptual knowledge. In this preliminary study, we compared these models using groups with high and low autistic trait scores (Autism-Spectrum Quotient). We found evidence supporting the cognitive bias model and no evidence for the enhanced sensory precision model.

Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing and physiological arousal in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.

The neuropeptide oxytocin has been shown to affect social interaction. Meanwhile, the underlying mechanism remains highly debated. Using an interpersonal finger-tapping paradigm, we investigated whether oxytocin affects the ability to synchronise with and adapt to the behaviour of others. Dyads received either oxytocin or a non-active placebo, intranasally. We show that in conditions where one dyad-member was tapping to another unresponsive dyad-member – i.e. one was following another who was leading/self-pacing – dyads given oxytocin were more synchronised than dyads given placebo. However, there was no effect when following a regular metronome or when both tappers were mutually adapting to each other. Furthermore, relative to their self-paced tapping partners, oxytocin followers were less variable than placebo followers. Our data suggests that oxytocin improves synchronisation to an unresponsive partner’s behaviour through a reduction in tapping-variability. Hence, oxytocin may facilitate social interaction by enhancing sensorimotor predictions supporting interpersonal synchronisation. The study thus provides novel perspectives on how neurobiological processes relate to socio-psychological behaviour and contributes to the growing evidence that synchronisation and prediction are central to social cognition.

Despite the obvious importance of deciding which career to pursue, little is known about the influence of personality on career choice. Here we investigated the relation between sensation seeking, a supposedly innate personality trait, and career choice in classical and 'rhythmic' students at the academies of music in Denmark. We compared data from groups of 59 classical and 36 'rhythmic' students, who completed a psychological test battery comprising the Zuckerman Sensation Seeking Scale, the Spielberger StateÁTrait Anxiety Inventory, as well as information about demographics and musical background. 'Rhythmic' students had significantly higher sensation seeking scores than classical students, predominantly driven by higher boredom susceptibility. Classical students showed significantly higher levels of state anxiety, when imagining themselves just before entering the stage for an important concert. The higher level of anxiety related to stage performance in classical musicians was not attributed to group differences in trait anxiety, but is presumably a consequence of differences in musical rehearsing and performance practices of the two styles of music. The higher sensation seeking scores observed in 'rhythmic' students, however, suggests that personality is associated with musical career choice.

Convergent research suggests that people with ASD have difficulties localizing sounds in space. These difficulties have implications for communication, the development of social behavior, and quality of life. Recently, a theory has emerged which treats perceptual symptoms in ASD as the product of impairments in implicit Bayesian inference; as suboptimalities in the integration of sensory evidence with prior perceptual knowledge. We present the results of an experiment that applies this new theory to understanding difficulties in auditory localization, and we find that adults with ASD integrate prior information less optimally when making perceptual judgments about the spatial sources of sounds. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for formal models of symptoms in ASD.

Few studies investigate gambling problems at the symptom level; even fewer investigate how symptom patterns change throughout the course of a gambling disorder. The current study utilized the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC; Grant et al., 2004) to investigate how the specific symptoms of disordered gambling relate to its severity and course. Results demonstrated that symptom patterns and stability changed as the number of symptoms endorsed increased. Symptom patterns varied considerably from prior to past year (PPY) to past year (PY) timeframes. Certain symptoms were more stable than others and held predictive value as markers of emerging pathological gambling (PG). In particular, gambling to escape problems was one of the most stable symptoms and also predictive of progression to PG; reliance on others to support gambling was predictive of progression to PG among participants at-risk for PG. The differential diagnostic value of various reported symptoms, as well as their lack of stability, has implications for both researchers and clinicians.