Decoding Music-Evoked Emotions in the Auditory and Motor Cortex

Abstract

Music can induce strong subjective experience of emotions, but it is debated whether these responses engage the same neural circuits as emotions elicited by biologically significant events. We examined the functional neural basis of music-induced emotions in a large sample (n = 102) of subjects who listened to emotionally engaging (happy, sad, fearful, and tender) pieces of instrumental music while their hemodynamic brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ratings of the four categorical emotions and liking were used to predict hemodynamic responses in general linear model (GLM) analysis of the fMRI data. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to reveal discrete neural signatures of the four categories of music-induced emotions. To map neural circuits governing non-musical emotions, the subjects were scanned while viewing short emotionally evocative film clips. The GLM revealed that most emotions were associated with activity in the auditory, somatosensory, and motor cortices, cingulate gyrus, insula, and precuneus. Fear and liking also engaged the amygdala. In contrast, the film clips strongly activated limbic and cortical regions implicated in emotional processing. MVPA revealed that activity in the auditory cortex and primary motor cortices reliably discriminated the emotion categories. Our results indicate that different music-induced basic emotions have distinct representations in regions supporting auditory processing, motor control, and interoception but do not strongly rely on limbic and medial prefrontal regions critical for emotions with survival value.

Decoding Subject’s Own Name in the Primary Auditory Cortex

“…In addition, it was found that the primary auditory cortex also showed a discriminative pattern among each pair of the non-SON stimuli (including FN, UN, SONREV). These findings were supported by previous studies, which found that the activation pattern of the primary auditory cortex was able to classify not only fundamental auditory perception, for instance, multiple sound categories (Staeren et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2015), but also high-level cognitive processes, including music-induced emotions (Putkinen et al, 2021), perceptual interpretation of ambiguous sound (Kilian-Hütten et al, 2011), and semantic processing (Fedorenko et al, 2012). Taken together, our results provided evidence that bilateral primary auditory cortex contains information to differentiate SON and non-SON, which may contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of the primary auditory cortex in processing a highly self-related stimuli, i.e., SON.…”

Classification of emotion categories based on functional connectivity patterns of the human brain

“…Also, between-subject variability in emotion category ratings was low, demonstrating that individuals from the same population experienced similar emotions (Supplementary Table S1). Yet, while we further guided the interpretation of the story by presenting the target emotion category for the listeners before each story, different individuals might interpret the emotional content of the story differently, leading to differences in emotion-related brain activity (see Putkinen et al., 2021 , for similar arguments on classification of musical emotions). This obviously explains why the classification accuracy in across-participant classification is in general lower than in within-participant classification (see also Saarimäki et al., 2016 ).…”

The rewarding compensatory mechanism of music enhances the sense of fairness

“…Eliciting materials that have been used in studies of incidental emotions influencing fair decision-making are mainly pictures, videos, smells, etc. Studies comparing media used for the laboratory induction of emotion (film clips, still images, and music) point out that music-induced emotions are more relevant to the complex psychological processes of individuals than emotions induced by films or images, and may affect their psychological and cognitive processes in different ways ( Baumgartner et al, 2006 ; Ellard et al, 2012 ; Putkinen et al, 2020 ). Table 1 suggests that participants in the white noise group were significantly more unhappy after listening to white noise.…”