Neural responses to nostalgia-evoking music modeled by elements of dynamic musical structure and individual differences in affective traits

Abstract

Cite this article as: Frederick S. Barrett and Petr Janata, Neural responses to nostalgia-evoking music modeled by elements of dynamic musical structure and individual differences in affective traits, Neuropsychologia, http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.08.012 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. AbstractNostalgia is an emotion that is most commonly associated with personally and socially relevant memories. It is primarily positive in valence and is readily evoked by music. It is also an idiosyncratic experience that varies between individuals based on affective traits. We identified frontal, limbic, paralimbic, and midbrain brain regions in which the strength of the relationship between ratings of nostalgia evoked by music and blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal was predicted by affective personality measures (nostalgia proneness and the sadness scale of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales) that are known to modulate the strength of nostalgic experiences. We also identified brain areas including the inferior frontal gyrus, substantia nigra, cerebellum, and insula in which time-varying BOLD activity correlated more strongly with the time-varying tonal structure of nostalgia-evoking music than with music that evoked no or little nostalgia. These findings illustrate one way in which the reward and emotion regulation networks of the brain are recruited during the experiencing of complex emotional experiences triggered by music. These findings also highlight the Running Head: Music-Evoked Nostalgia Page 2 of 43 importance of considering individual differences when examining the neural responses to strong and idiosyncratic emotional experiences. Finally, these findings provide a further demonstration of the use of time-varying stimulus-specific information in the investigation of music-evoked experiences.Keywords: emotion; autobiographical memory; tonality; music information retrieval Nostalgia is a positive emotional experience that is characterized by memories that feature the self in social contexts (Batcho, 2007;Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt, & Routledge, 2006). Nostalgia plays a functional role in maintaining personal wellbeing by increasing self-positivity (Hart et al., 2011), self esteem (Wildschut et al., 2006), and accessibility of positive self-attributes (Vess, Arndt, Routledge, Sedikides, & Wildschut, 2012). Socially relevant benefits of nostalgic experience include increased feelings of social connectedness (Hart et al., 2011) and perceived social support (Zhou, Sedikides, Wildschut, & Gao, 2008), often through reviving the memory of m...

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