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Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions

Abstract

Neural correlates of the often-powerful emotional responses to music are poorly understood. Here we used positron emission tomography to examine cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes related to affective responses to music. Ten volunteers were scanned while listening to six versions of a novel musical passage varying systematically in degree of dissonance. Reciprocal CBF covariations were observed in several distinct paralimbic and neocortical regions as a function of dissonance and of perceived pleasantness/unpleasantness. The findings suggest that music may recruit neural mechanisms similar to those previously associated with pleasant/unpleasant emotional states, but different from those underlying other components of music perception, and other emotions such as fear.

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Figure 1: Examples of music stimuli and average subject ratings of unpleasant versus pleasant and happy versus sad for each version.
Figure 2: Cortical regions demonstrating significant rCBF correlations with dissonance level.
Figure 3: Cortical regions demonstrating significant rCBF correlations with ratings of increasing unpleasantness and increasing pleasantness.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Christine Beckett for assistance in composing the music stimuli used in this experiment, and Pierre Ahad for his expertise in sound technology and computer programming. We also thank the technical staff of the McConnell Brain Imaging Unit and of the Medical Cyclotron Unit for their assistance, and Sylvain Milot for his technical expertise. This work was supported by Grants MT11541 and GR13972 from the Medical Research Council of Canada, by the Jeanne Timmins Costello Fellowship in Neuroscience awarded to A.J.B. by the Montreal Neurological Institute, and by the McDonnell-Pew Cognitive Neuroscience Program.

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Correspondence to Anne J. Blood.

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Blood, A., Zatorre, R., Bermudez, P. et al. Emotional responses to pleasant and unpleasant music correlate with activity in paralimbic brain regions. Nat Neurosci 2, 382–387 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/7299

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