It's Sad but I Like It: The Neural Dissociation Between Musical Emotions and Liking in Experts and Laypersons

Abstract

Emotion-related areas of the brain, such as the medial frontal cortices, amygdala, and striatum, are activated during listening to sad or happy music as well as during listening to pleasurable music. Indeed, in music, like in other arts, sad and happy emotions might co-exist and be distinct from emotions of pleasure or enjoyment. Here we aimed at discerning the neural correlates of sadness or happiness in music as opposed those related to musical enjoyment. We further investigated whether musical expertise modulates the neural activity during affective listening of music. To these aims, 13 musicians and 16 non-musicians brought to the lab their most liked and disliked musical pieces with a happy and sad connotation. Based on a listening test, we selected the most representative 18 sec excerpts of the emotions of interest for each individual participant. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings were obtained while subjects listened to and rated the excerpts. The cortico-thalamo-striatal reward circuit and motor areas were more active during liked than disliked music, whereas only the auditory cortex and the right amygdala were more active for disliked over liked music. These results discern the brain structures responsible for the perception of sad and happy emotions in music from those related to musical enjoyment. We also obtained novel evidence for functional differences in the limbic system associated with musical expertise, by showing enhanced liking-related activity in fronto-insular and cingulate areas in musicians.

Insula‐based networks in professional musicians: Evidence for increased functional connectivity during resting state fMRI

“…Similarly, cross-sectional studies have associated musical training and aural skills with greater gray matter volume and its myelination in several brain regions including the insular cortices Shimizu and Sakai, 2015]. Lesions of the insula and its disconnection with the auditory cortex have furthermore been associated with musical anhedonia [Satoh et al, 2005;Sihvonen et al, 2016], whereas positive responses to pleasurable music correlated with enhanced activity in frontoinsular areas in trained musicians [Brattico et al, 2015]. This is in line with a prominent theory that features the insula as the neural substrate of human awareness [Craig, 2002[Craig, , 2009a[Craig, , 2011.…”

Towards Tunable Consensus Clustering for Studying Functional Brain Connectivity During Affective Processing

“…The apparent discrepancy with previous findings obtained with the same dataset relates to the divergent approaches used. In the current study, functional coupling among areas within the same cluster was computed and the temporal dynamics of the BOLD response within each cluster was then compared between musicians and nonmusicians for all the stimulus conditions, whereas in the study by Brattico et al 33 the overall magnitudes of the BOLD regional responses in the whole brain were compared between groups with the general linear model and post hoc t-tests. Moreover, since in the current study our main goal was to validate a new clustering approach rather than testing the neural adaptations to affective music listening as a consequence of musical training, we did not proceed in studying the differences in the response shape patterns between musicians and nonmusicians for each of the stimulus categories.…”

Global Sensory Qualities and Aesthetic Experience in Music

“…Musical pieces that resemble classical music styles, such as film soundtracks (Huckvale, 1990) or computer game music (Bridgett, 2013), are today composed and produced with computers. While historically musical aesthetics has concentrated on the classical music genre, more recently also pop/rock and jazz music has received attention by aesthetic (von Appen, 2007; Juslin et al, 2016) and neuroaesthetic scholars (Limb and Braun, 2008; Janata, 2009; Berns et al, 2010; Brattico et al, 2011, 2015; Johnson et al, 2011; Montag et al, 2011; Pereira et al, 2011; Salimpoor et al, 2011, 2013; Zuckerman et al, 2012; Istok et al, 2013; Bogert et al, 2016). Indeed, even though “rock musicians never ask if a composition is aesthetically valuable,” they are still keen in evaluation “if it sounds good ,” as observed by Račić (1981, p. 200, emphasis from the original).…”