Music and emotion: electrophysiological correlates of the processing of pleasant and unpleasant music

Human emotion and its electrophysiological correlates are still poorly understood. The present study examined whether the valence of perceived emotions would differentially influence EEG power spectra and heart rate (HR). Pleasant and unpleasant emotions were induced by consonant and dissonant music. Unpleasant (compared to pleasant) music evoked a significant decrease of HR, replicating the pattern of HR responses previously described for the processing of emotional pictures, sounds, and films. In the EEG, pleasant (contrasted to unpleasant) music was associated with an increase of frontal midline (Fm) theta power. This effect is taken to reflect emotional processing in close interaction with attentional functions. These findings show that Fm theta is modulated by emotion more strongly than previously believed.     

Performing music can induce greater modulation of emotion-related psychophysiological responses than listening to music

The present study investigated the differential effects of music-induced emotion on heart rate (HR) and its variability (HRV) while playing music on the piano and listening to a recording of the same piece of music. Sixteen pianists were monitored during tasks involving emotional piano performance, non-emotional piano performance, emotional perception, and non-emotional perception. It was found that emotional induction during both perception and performance modulated HR and HRV, and that such modulations were significantly greater during musical performance than during perception. The results confirmed that musical performance was far more effective in modulating emotion-related autonomic nerve activity than musical perception in musicians. The findings suggest the presence of a neural network of reward-emotion-associated autonomic nerve activity for musical performance that is independent of a neural network for musical perception.     

Natural selective attention: orienting and emotion

The foundations of orienting and attention are hypothesized to stem from activation of defensive and appetitive motivational systems that evolved to protect and sustain the life of the individual. Motivational activation initiates a cascade of perceptual and motor processes that facilitate the selection of appropriate behavior. Among these are detection of significance, indexed by a late centro-parietal positivity in the event-related potential, enhanced perceptual processing, indexed by a initial cardiac deceleration, and preparation for action, indexed by electrodermal changes. Data exploring the role of stimulus novelty and significance in orienting are presented that indicate different components of the orienting response habituate at different rates. Taken together, it is suggested that orienting is mediated by activation of fundamental motivational systems that have evolved to support survival.     

Fleeting images: a new look at early emotion discrimination

The visual brain quickly sorted stimuli for emotional impact despite high-speed presentation (3 or 5 per s) in a sustained, serial torrent of 700 complex pictures. Event-related potentials, recorded with a dense electrode array, showed selective discrimination of emotionally arousing stimuli from less affective content. Primary sources of this activation were over the occipital cortices, extending to right parietal cortex, suggesting a processing focus in the posterior visual system. Emotion discrimination was independent of formal pictorial properties (color, brightness. spatial frequency, and complexity). The data support the hypothesis of a very short-term conceptual memory store (M. C. Potter, 1999)-shown here to include a fleeting but reliable assessment of affective meaning.     

An exploration of emotion regulation in psychosis

The emotional experience of individuals who experience psychosis has historically been neglected, possibly due to the divide between the psychoses and neuroses. This study examined emotional experience and regulation in individuals who had experienced psychosis, individuals experiencing anxiety or mood disorders, and non‐patient controls. Participants completed validated measures of emotional experience and emotion regulation. Both clinical groups were found to experience similar levels of emotions, and in comparison to the non‐patient controls, they experienced greater levels of negatively valenced emotions and lower levels of happiness. Both clinical groups also used similar emotion regulation strategies, and in comparison to non‐patient controls, they used significantly more dysfunctional and less functional strategies, suggesting that the emotional experience and emotion regulation strategies of people who have experienced psychosis are more similar to non‐psychotic disorders than have previously been thought to be the case. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Practitioner Message: ? Individuals with psychosis experience similar emotions as individuals with anxiety and mood disorders, namely more unhappiness, fear and less happiness. ? People with psychosis attempt to regulate these emotions in similar ways to people with mood and anxiety problems, by using more dysfunctional emotional regulation strategies such as ruminating. ? Clinicians may want to pay closer attention to assessing the emotion regulation strategies of those who experience psychosis and consider the implications of these in therapy. ? They may also want to consider the role emotional dysregulation may play in the development, maintenance and course of psychosis. ? An emotion regulation approach to psychosis may be characterised by focussing on emotional experiences and the individual's response to these, as opposed to psychotic symptoms.     

Target processing is facilitated by motivationally relevant cues

The effect that motivationally relevant stimuli have on processes of attentional engagement and disengagement was investigated during two modified peripheral cueing paradigms. Sexual, mutilation, threatening, and neutral stimuli served as peripheral cues in both experiments. Responses were made to target location in Experiment 1 (N=19 female) and target identity in Experiment 2 (N=18 female). As indexed by enhanced target-evoked P1 and P3b component amplitudes, target processing was facilitated by the presentation of sexual and mutilation stimuli in both experiments. This facilitation in response to targets cued by sexual and mutilation stimuli occurred regardless of whether cueing was valid or invalid as demonstrated by the non-significant cue validity x picture-type interaction. As such, the processes of attentional engagement (as inferred by responses to validly cued targets) and attentional disengagement (as inferred by responses to invalidly cued targets) were not differentially affected by the motivational relevance of the preceding cue. These results indicate that in a non-clinical sample, participants can shift attention rapidly to process information following the onset of motivationally relevant stimuli at attended (valid) and unattended (invalid) locations and that target processing is facilitated by the presence of appetitive and aversive cues.     

中国古典音乐诱发情绪的生理活动研究

目的 探讨音乐诱发情绪的脑电及自主神经反应.方法 随机抽取20名研究生(8名男生,12名女生),倾听两段旋律相同但用不同乐器演奏的乐曲,采用BIOPAC MP150型多导生理仪,对倾听乐曲时的主观体验和脑电以及一些自主神经生理反应进行研究.结果 ①两段乐曲分别诱发出了愉快情绪和悲伤情绪(t=8.90,P<0.01;t=...     

Phasic boosting of auditory perception by visual emotion

Emotionally negative stimuli boost perceptual processes. There is little known, however, about the timing of this modulation. The present study aims at elucidating the phasic effects of, emotional processing on auditory processing within subsequent time-windows of visual emotional, processing in humans. We recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants responded to a, discrimination task of faces with neutral or fearful expressions. A brief complex tone, which subjects, were instructed to ignore, was displayed concomitantly, but with different asynchronies respective to, the image onset. Analyses of the N1 auditory event-related potential (ERP) revealed enhanced brain, responses in presence of fearful faces. Importantly, this effect occurred at picture-tone asynchronies of, 100 and 150 ms, but not when these were displayed simultaneously, or at 50 ms or 200 ms asynchrony. These results confirm the existence of a fast-operating crossmodal effect of visual emotion on auditory, processing, suggesting a phasic variation according to the time-course of emotional processing.     

大学生面孔表情材料的标准化及其评定

目的：建立大学生面孔表情材料系统。方法：采集在校大学生的7种情绪面孔图片，首先由4名评分者对情绪面孔进行类别的初次评定，选取评价一致的图片，再由60名评分者对其进行类别和情绪强烈程度的判定。结果：得到一系列具有代表性的7种情绪面孔图片，并且每张图片都有其相应的情绪强烈程度分数。结论：评分者识别7种情绪类型的难易程度存在差异。     

Implicit conditioning of faces via the social regulation of emotion: ERP evidence of early attentional biases for security conditioned faces

Not much is known about the neural and psychological processes that promote the initial conditions necessary for positive social bonding. This study explores one method of conditioned bonding utilizing dynamics related to the social regulation of emotion and attachment theory. This form of conditioning involves repeated presentations of negative stimuli followed by images of warm, smiling faces. L. Beckes, J. Simpson, and A. Erickson (2010) found that this conditioning procedure results in positive associations with the faces measured via a lexical decision task, suggesting they are perceived as comforting. This study found that the P1 ERP was similarly modified by this conditioning procedure and the P1 amplitude predicted lexical decision times to insecure words primed by the faces. The findings have implications for understanding how the brain detects supportive people, the flexibility and modifiability of early ERP components, and social bonding more broadly.     

Never mind the spider: Late positive potentials to phobic threat at fixation are unaffected by perceptual load

Research suggests that processing of emotional stimuli may be eliminated if a concurrent task places sufficient demands on attentional resources. To test whether this holds for stimuli with strong emotional significance, pictures of spiders as well as mushrooms were presented at fixation to spider‐fearful and non‐fearful participants. Concurrently, perceptual load was manipulated in two levels with a peripheral letter discrimination task. Results of event‐related potentials showed that, compared with non‐fearful participants, spider‐fearful participants showed greater late positive potentials (LPP) to spiders than mushrooms, which provides a manipulation check that spiders were emotionally meaningful to spider‐fearful participants. Critically, this effect was not affected by level of perceptual load. These findings suggest that strong emotional stimuli at fixation may resist manipulations of perceptual load.     

The music of speech: music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language

The main aim of the present experiment was to determine whether extensive musical training facilitates pitch contour processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of final notes' or words' fundamental frequency (F0), and we recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine the precise time course of pitch processing. We compared professional musicians and nonmusicians. Results revealed that within both domains, musicians detected weak F0 manipulations better than nonmusicians. Moreover, F0 manipulations within both music and language elicited similar variations in brain electrical potentials, with overall shorter onset latency for musicians than for nonmusicians. Finally, the scalp distribution of an early negativity in the linguistic task varied with musical expertise, being largest over temporal sites bilaterally for musicians and largest centrally and over left temporal sites for nonmusicians. These results are taken as evidence that extensive musical training influences the perception of pitch contour in spoken language.     

From emotion perception to emotion experience: emotions evoked by pictures and classical music.

Most previous neurophysiological studies evoked emotions by presenting visual stimuli. Models of the emotion circuits in the brain have for the most part ignored emotions arising from musical stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first emotion brain study which examined the influence of visual and musical stimuli on brain processing. Highly arousing pictures of the International Affective Picture System and classical musical excerpts were chosen to evoke the three basic emotions of happiness, sadness and fear. The emotional stimuli modalities were presented for 70 s either alone or combined (congruent) in a counterbalanced and random order. Electroencephalogram (EEG) Alpha-Power-Density, which is inversely related to neural electrical activity, in 30 scalp electrodes from 24 right-handed healthy female subjects, was recorded. In addition, heart rate (HR), skin conductance responses (SCR), respiration, temperature and psychometrical ratings were collected. Results showed that the experienced quality of the presented emotions was most accurate in the combined conditions, intermediate in the picture conditions and lowest in the sound conditions. Furthermore, both the psychometrical ratings and the physiological involvement measurements (SCR, HR, Respiration) were significantly increased in the combined and sound conditions compared to the picture conditions. Finally, repeated measures ANOVA revealed the largest Alpha-Power-Density for the sound conditions, intermediate for the picture conditions, and lowest for the combined conditions, indicating the strongest activation in the combined conditions in a distributed emotion and arousal network comprising frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital neural structures. Summing up, these findings demonstrate that music can markedly enhance the emotional experience evoked by affective pictures.     

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia, emotion, and emotion regulation during social interaction

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) figures prominently in emotional responding, but its exact role remains unclear. The present study tests two hypotheses: (1) Between-person differences in resting RSA are related to emotional reactivity, and (2) within-person changes in RSA are related to regulatory efforts. Pairs of women watched an upsetting film and discussed it. One woman in each of the experimental dyads was asked to either suppress or to reappraise during the conversation. Their partners and both members of the control dyads conversed naturally. Between-person differences in resting RSA were assessed with paced breathing, and within-person changes in RSA were calculated from baseline to the conversation accounting for respiration. Women with higher resting RSA experienced and expressed more negative emotion, and women who attempted to regulate their emotions either by suppressing or reappraising showed larger increases in RSA than controls.     

面孔表情的ERP研究进展

情绪 (emotion)是情感的外部表现 ,是人们适应性的一种表现 ,也构成了一个基本的动机系统。面孔是人类表达、认知情感的重要工具和途径 ,正确的表达和识别面部表情是人类生存的一项重要的技能。人们运用各种手段研究面孔、情绪、大脑及其与其他认知方面的关系 ,本文总结了前人利用事件相关电位 (ERP)技术研究面孔和情绪的方法、结果、影响因素并且对面孔及情绪的ERP研究提出问题并做出了展望。     

Smart environment architecture for emotion detection and regulation

This paper introduces an architecture as a proof-of-concept for emotion detection and regulation in smart health environments. The aim of the proposal is to detect the patient’s emotional state by analysing his/her physiological signals, facial expression and behaviour. Then, the system provides the best-tailored actions in the environment to regulate these emotions towards a positive mood when possible. The current state-of-the-art in emotion regulation through music and colour/light is implemented with the final goal of enhancing the quality of life and care of the subject. The paper describes the three main parts of the architecture, namely “Emotion Detection”, “Emotion Regulation” and “Emotion Feedback Control”. “Emotion Detection” works with the data captured from the patient, whereas “Emotion Regulation” offers him/her different musical pieces and colour/light settings. “Emotion Feedback Control” performs as a feedback control loop to assess the effect of emotion regulation over emotion detection. We are currently testing the overall architecture and the intervention in real environments to achieve our final goal.     

An effective training to increase accurate recognition of patient emotion cues

Objective

For healthcare providers, accurate perception of patients, particularly accurate recognition of patient emotions, is an ability associated with better patient care and more satisfied patients. Despite the importance of accurately recognizing patient cues for provider-patient communication, research on clinically relevant training programs is limited. The effectiveness of a multi-component training program designed to enhance emotion cue recognition ability was experimentally assessed.

Methods

The comprehensive training included raising awareness about the importance of emotion cues in healthcare interactions, providing instruction on increasing emotion cue recognition accuracy, and practicing emotion recognition while receiving feedback. Undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to one of five training conditions or an untrained control condition to experimentally test the efficacy of the comprehensive training and each training component.

Results

Participants were significantly more accurate on a standardized test of patient emotion cue recognition in the comprehensive condition, as compared to those participants in the control condition, with Practice with Feedback emerging as the most effective component.

Conclusions

Results suggest that a 30-min emotion recognition training intervention can significantly improve emotion recognition accuracy.

Practice implications

The results can be used to guide development and implementation of future research and programs aimed at increasing providers’ emotion recognition.     

Gender differences in contributions of emotion to psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder

Traditional conceptualizations of psychopathy highlight the importance of affective features as they relate to social deviance; however, little empirical research has actually investigated specific roles of emotion and emotion processing with respect to antisocial conduct. Antisocial personality disorder (APD), prevalent in forensic populations, is commonly associated with psychopathy despite the notable omission of such core affective features in its diagnosis. In this paper, we review the empirical literature on the contribution of emotion to psychopathy and APD, highlighting in particular research on emotion processing and various facets of emotional expression, including empathy and alexithymia. Research findings are discussed on gender differences in emotional functioning and their likely effects on the assessment of psychopathy and APD. Given the known gender differences in the expressions of emotion, the article concludes with recommendations to bridge research for different offender groups, including psychopathy and APD.     

Timing effects of antecedent- and response-focused emotion regulation strategies

Distraction and cognitive reappraisal influence the emotion-generative process at early stages and have been shown to effectively attenuate emotional responding. Inhibiting emotion-expressive behavior is thought to be less beneficial due to later implementation, but empirical results are mixed. Thus, the current study examined the temporal dynamics of these emotion regulation strategies at attenuating the late positive potential (LPP) while participants were shown unpleasant pictures. Results revealed that all strategies successfully reduced the LPP and self-reported negative affect. We confirmed that distraction attenuated the LPP earlier than cognitive reappraisal. Surprisingly, expressive suppression affected emotional responding as early as distraction. This suggests that suppression was used preventively and disrupted the emotion-generative process from the very beginning instead of targeting the emotional response itself. Thus, the obtained results point to the importance of considering the point in time when response-focused emotion regulation strategies are being implemented.     

Unconscious perception of non-threatening facial emotion in parietal extinction

The success of humans as social animals relies heavily on our ability to perceive the emotional expressions conveyed by others faces. Functional brain imaging has shown that expressions of fear and anger selectively activate the amygdala, even when the faces conveying the emotion are presented briefly and masked to prevent conscious perception (Morris et al. 1998; Whalen et al. 1998). Such results suggest that facial emotions signalling potential threat can be extracted rapidly and automatically by the human visual system, in the absence of conscious face perception. Here we asked whether a patient with spatial extinction, a profound disorder of perception due to right parietal lobe damage, would be sensitive to non-threatening (happy and sad) emotional expressions of faces that are not consciously perceived. We show that the emotion conveyed by an extinguished face in the contralesional hemifield can influence judgements of the emotion of a subsequent target face presented foveally. The finding of significant affective priming from extinguished faces fits with the proposal that facial emotion can be processed in the absence of conscious perception, and that preserved limbic and inferotemporal structures retain privileged access to the emotional content of unseen faces.