Music and emotion: perceptual determinants, immediacy, and isolation after brain damage

Abstract

This study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emotional responses to music in the context of severe deficits in music processing after brain damage in a nonmusician. Six experiments were designed to explore the perceptual basis of emotional judgments in music. In each experiment, the same set of 32 excerpts taken from the classical repertoire and intended to convey a happy or sad tone were presented under various transformations and with different task demands. In Expts. 1 to 3, subjects were required to judge on a 10-point scale whether the excerpts were happy or sad. Altogether the results show that emotional judgments are (a) highly consistent across subjects and resistant to brain damage; (b) determined by musical structure (mode and tempo); and (c) immediate. Experiments 4 to 6 were designed to assess whether emotional and non-emotional judgments reflect the operations of a single perceptual analysis system. To this aim, we searched for evidence of dissociation in our brain-damaged patient, I.R., by using tasks that do not require emotional interpretation. These non-emotional tasks were a 'same-different' classification task (Expt. 4), error detection tasks (Expt. 5A,B) and a change monitoring task (Expt. 6). I.R. was impaired in these non-emotional tasks except when the change affected the mode and the tempo of the excerpt, in which case I.R. performed close to normal. The results are discussed in relation to the possibility that emotional and non-emotional judgments are the products of distinct pathways.

Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

“…Like in facial expressions and in speech prosody, basic emotions can be universally recognized in music (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999;Fritz et al, 2009) and recognition can occur within less than a second (Peretz, Gagnon, & Bouchard, 1998). The identification of emotions in music is highly consistent across subjects (Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2005;Thompson, 2009) and it has been shown to correlate with emotional intelligence (Resnicow, Salovey, & Repp, 2004).…”

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

“…Further compelling evidence of implicit musical effects comes from studies of brain-damaged patients suggesting that cortical processing may not be essential for music to arouse emotions (Panksepp & Bernatzky, 2002;Peretz et al, 1998). A patient with a large lesion of the temporal and frontal cortices had severe impairments in music perception but intact capacity for music appreciation (Peretz et al, 1998).…”

“…A patient with a large lesion of the temporal and frontal cortices had severe impairments in music perception but intact capacity for music appreciation (Peretz et al, 1998). A number of evolutionarily old brain regions, such as the amygdala, insula, and striatum, have consistently been implicated in music emotion induction and enjoyment (Blood & Zatorre, 2001;Blood et al, 1999;Brattico et al, 2013;Koelsch, 2014;Koelsch et al, 2006;Salimpoor et al, 2011).…”

Indexing music by mood: design and integration of an automatic content-based annotator

“…Psychological studies have shown that emotions conveyed by music are objective enough to be valid for mathematical modeling [4,13,24,32]. Moreover, Vieillard et al [43] demonstrated that within the same culture, the emotional responses to music could be highly consistent.…”