Musical Emotions in the Brain Share

November 2014 – Unveiling brain networks that mediate music-induced emotions, or musical emotions, is challenging but of great interest for several reasons. First, musical emotions represent a remarkable and intriguing experience that may yield precious insights into the workings of the human mind. Second, musical emotions lack the sort of obvious adaptive function and cultural invariance characteristic of basic emotions, preventing a direct appeal to evolutionary explanations for their origin. Third, and relatedly, because musical emotions are very different from affective phenomena traditionally investigated in neuroscience, such as fear, joy, disgust, and so forth, they offer useful avenues to study emotions across a wider range and thus compare their neural underpinnings across more diverse sam-ples of affective subjective experiences. Fourth, studying the brain mechanisms of musical emotions can help us understand the neurocognitive processes at play in the perception and production of music itself. Still another reason is that building bridges between brain science and musical art might eventually give composers or performers novel tools to exploit in ar-tistic creation (conversely, neuroscientists can gain new insights from the work of musicologists and musicians). Of course, these are just a few of the reasons to be interested in musical emotions, and many others certainly apply. Arguably, neuroscience research has yet to fully exploit the richness and originality offered by emotions in the music domain. A large majority of studies has inves-tigated brain activation patterns associated with dichotomous categories such as pleasant/positive vs. unpleasant/negative emotions. This “standard ” approach parallels classic neuroscience work on “basic ” emotions and primary reinforcers, such as reward and fear (Armony & Vuilleumier, 2013). However, it does no