Investigating emotion with music: neuroscientific approaches

This article briefly reviews the few functional imaging studies conducted so far on the investigation of emotion with music. Basically, these studies showed involvement of limbic and paralimbic cerebral structures (such as amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, temporal poles, insula, ventral striatum, orbitofronal, as well as cingulate cortex) during the processing of music with emotional valence (such as pleasant or unpleasant). The second part of this article highlights the role of unexpected musical events for the elicitation of emotional responses. Recent studies suggest that music-syntactically irregular chords elicit changes in electrodermal activity, and that such chords activate orbital frontolateral cortex, as well as the amygdala (that is, brain structures that have been implicated in emotion processing). The third part of this article mentions findings on the temporal dynamics of emotion (that is, changes in the physiological correlates of emotion processing over time). This issue has so far been mainly neglected in the functional imaging (and psychophysiological) literature.