Summary: New research reveals how the brain navigates emotional transitions, using music as a tool to map changing neural patterns. Scientists found that emotional responses in the brain depend heavily on the listener’s prior emotional state.
For instance, hearing a happy tune before a sad one changes the way the brain processes the sadness, compared to if tension came first. These findings open new possibilities for treating emotional rigidity in mood disorders by targeting how the brain shifts between emotional states.
Key Facts:
- Context Matters: Prior emotional states shape how the brain reacts to new emotions.
- Music as a Tool: Researchers used composer-created music to trigger and track emotional transitions.
- Therapeutic Potential: The findings may inform interventions for depression and mood disorders involving emotional rigidity.
Source: SfN
How does the human brain track emotions and support transitions between these emotions?
In a new eNeuro paper, Matthew Sachs and colleagues, from Colombia University, used music and an advanced approach for assessing brain activity to shed light on the context dependence and fluctuating nature of emotions.
The researchers collaborated with composers to create songs that evoked different emotions at separate time points. They then assessed the brain activity of study participants as they listened to these songs.
Sachs et al. discovered that changes in patterns of activity in brain areas that support sound processing and social cognition reflected transitions between different emotions triggered by music.
Notably, these changes in patterns of brain activity were influenced by the previous emotional state. For example, if someone listened to a joyful passage of music before listening to a sad passage, their brain responded differently to the sad passage than someone who previously listened to a tense musical passage.
The researchers also found that when the previous emotion was more similar to the new emotion triggered by music, the emotional transition in the brain occurred earlier in time.
These findings suggest that the relationship between neural activity and emotional responses may depend on the context of a person’s previous emotional state.
Expressing excitement about the therapeutic potential of this work, says Sachs, “We know that people who suffer from mood disorders or depression often demonstrate emotional rigidity, where they basically get stuck in an emotional state.
“This study suggests that maybe we could take someone with depression, for instance, and use the approach we developed to identify neural markers for the emotional rigidity that keeps them in a very negative state.”
About this music and emotion research news
Author: SfN Media
Source: SfN
Contact: SfN Media – SfN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Emotions in the Brain Are Dynamic and Contextually Dependent: Using Music to Measure Affective Transitions” by Matthew Sachs et al. eNeuro
Abstract
Emotions in the Brain Are Dynamic and Contextually Dependent: Using Music to Measure Affective Transitions
Our ability to shift from one emotion to the next allows us to adapt our behaviors to a constantly changing and often uncertain environment.
Although previous studies have identified cortical and subcortical regions involved in affective responding, none have shown how these regions track and represent transitions between different emotional states nor how such responses are modulated based on the recent emotional context.
To study this, we commissioned new musical pieces designed to systematically move participants (N = 39, 20 males and 19 females) through different emotional states during fMRI and to manipulate the emotional context in which different participants heard a musical motif.
Using a combination of data-driven (Hidden Markov modeling) and hypothesis-driven methods, we confirmed that spatiotemporal patterns of activation along the temporal-parietal axis reflect transitions between music-evoked emotions.
We found that the spatial and temporal signatures of these neural response patterns, as well as self-reported emotion ratings, were sensitive to the emotional context in which the music was heard.
In particular, brain-state transitions associated with emotional changes occurred earlier in time when the preceding affective state was of a similar valence to the current affective state.
The findings argue that emotional changes are an essential signal by which the temporoparietal lobe segments our continuous experiences, and further clarify its role in linking changes in external auditory signals with our dynamic and contextually-dependent emotional responses.
