Neural Correlates of Music and Emotion

This chapter presents a theoretical and empirical review of studies of the neural correlates of emotional responses to music. First, it outlines basic definitions and distinctions of the field of music and affect. Second, it describes an extensive theoretical framework that may serve to organize the domain. Third, the authors review seventy-eight empirical studies (e.g., PET/fMRI, EEG, lesion studies) conducted between 1982 and 2016. They distinguish different empirical approaches to music and emotion in brain research and draw some general conclusions based on the results so far. The review reveals that some brain areas have been more or less consistently reported across studies, with partly distinct patterns for perception and induction of emotions, but that we still do not know what role each brain region plays in the emotion process. This is largely due to a lack of studies that attempt to manipulate underlying psychological mechanisms in a systematic manner. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the results and by making methodological recommendations for future research.

Musical Chords as Affective Priming Context in a Word-Evaluation Task

Using an affective priming paradigm, we demonstrated that the affective tone of musical chords influences the evaluation of target words. In Experiment 1, participants heard either consonant chords with three tones or dissonant chords with four tones as primes and then saw a positive or a negative word as target. Even participants who were unaware of the hypothesis of the experiment evaluated target words faster if the words were preceded by a similarly valenced chord (e.g., consonant-holiday) as compared to affectively incongruent chord-word pairs (e.g. dissonanthumor). In Experiment 2, results of Experiment 1 were replicated even when chord density was held constant at three tones per chord. Results suggest that the affective tone of single musical elements is automatically extracted and might therefore be viewed as a basic process contributing to the strong connection between music and affect.