The impact of musical pleasure and musical hedonia on verbal episodic memory

Music listening is one of the most pleasurable activities in our life. As a rewarding stimulus, pleasant music could induce long-term memory improvements for the items encoded in close temporal proximity. In the present study, we behaviourally investigated (1) whether musical pleasure and musical hedonia enhance verbal episodic memory, and (2) whether such enhancement takes place even when the pleasant stimulus is not present during the encoding. Participants (N = 100) were asked to encode words presented in different auditory contexts (highly and lowly pleasant classical music, and control white noise), played before and during (N = 49), or only before (N = 51) the encoding. The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire was used to measure participants’ sensitivity to musical reward. 24 h later, participants’ verbal episodic memory was tested (old/new recognition and remember/know paradigm). Results revealed that participants with a high musical reward sensitivity present an increased recollection performance, especially for words encoded in a highly pleasant musical context. Furthermore, this effect persists even when the auditory stimulus is not concurrently present during the encoding of target items. Taken together, these findings suggest that musical pleasure might constitute a helpful encoding context able to drive memory improvements via reward mechanisms.

A Curious Case of Flower Phobia: Anthophobia

ABSTRACTFears, anxieties and specific phobias are classified as internalizing behavior problems. The development of specific phobias may result from the pairing of a specific object or situation with the emotion of fear. Flowers are usually perceived as pleasant stimulus, producing a relaxing effect on our mind and body, but here we present a rare case, wherein flowers are perceived as a malevolent stimulus and producing phobic anxiety in an eleven-year old boy, leading to avoidance behaviors and much interference in normal functioning. He was diagnosed to have Specific Phobia of natural environment type with Somnambulism and treated with SSRI (escitalopram) and Behavior Therapy (systematic desensitization). Over a period of eight months his symptoms remitted completely and he maintained the remission for now one year with no further intervention.

Representation of Pleasant and Aversive Taste in the Human Brain

In this study, the representation of taste in the orbitofrontal cortex was investigated to determine whether or not a pleasant and an aversive taste have distinct or overlapping representations in this region. The pleasant stimulus used was sweet taste (1 M glucose), and the unpleasant stimulus was salt taste (0.1 M NaCl). We used an on/off block design in a 3T fMRI scanner with a tasteless solution delivered in the offperiod to control for somatosensory or swallowing-related effects. It was found that parts of the orbitofrontal cortex were activated ( P < 0.005 corrected) by glucose (in 6/7 subjects) and by salt (in 6/7 subjects). In the group analysis, separate areas of the orbitofrontal cortex were found to be activated by pleasant and aversive tastes. The involvement of the amygdala in the representation of pleasant as well as aversive tastes was also investigated. The amygdala was activated (region of interest analysis, P< 0.025 corrected) by the pleasant taste of glucose (5/7 subjects) as well as by the aversive taste of salt (4/7 subjects). Activation by both stimuli was also found in the frontal opercular/insular (primary) taste cortex. We conclude that the orbitofrontal cortex is involved in processing tastes that have both positive and negative affective valence and that different areas of the orbitofrontal cortex may be activated by pleasant and unpleasant tastes. We also conclude that the amygdala is activated not only by an affectively unpleasant taste, but also by a taste that is affectively pleasant, thus providing evidence that the amygdala is involved in effects produced by positively affective as well as by negatively affective stimuli.

The use of “Emotive Imagery” in the Treatment of Children's Phobias

Some of the earliest objective approaches to the removal of specific anxieties and fears in children were based on the fact that neurotic (learned, unadaptive) responses can be eliminated by the repeated and simultaneous evocation of stronger incompatible responses. An early and well-known example of this approach was the experiment of Jones (1) in which a child's fear of rabbits was gradually eliminated by introducing a “pleasant stimulus” i.e., food (thus evoking the anxiety-inhibiting response of eating) in the presence of the rabbit. The general method of “gradual habituation” was advocated by Jersild and Holmes (2) as being superior to all others in the elimination of children's fears. This rationale was crystallized in Wolpe's (3) formulation of the Reciprocal inhibition Principle, which deserves the closest possible study: “If a response antagonistic to anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxietyevoking stimuli so that is accompanied by a complete or partial suppression of the anxiety responses, the bond between these stimuli and the anxiety responses will be weakened.”