Abstract
Music has the capacity to elicit strong positive feelings in humans by activating the brain’s reward system. Because group emotional dynamics is a central concern of social neurosciences, the study of emotion in natural/ecological conditions is gaining interest. This study aimed to show that high-density EEG (HD-EEG) is able to reveal patterns of cerebral activities previously identified by fMRI or PET scans when the subject experiences pleasurable musical chills. We used HD-EEG to record participants (11 female, 7 male) while listening to their favorite pleasurable chill-inducing musical excerpts; they reported their subjective emotional state from low pleasure up to chills. HD-EEG results showed an increase of theta activity in the prefrontal cortex when arousal and emotional ratings increased, which are associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation localized using source localization algorithms. In addition, we identified two specific patterns of chills: a decreased theta activity in the right central region, which could reflect supplementary motor area activation during chills and may be related to rhythmic anticipation processing, and a decreased theta activity in the right temporal region, which may be related to musical appreciation and could reflect the right superior temporal gyrus activity. The alpha frontal/prefrontal asymmetry did not reflect the felt emotional pleasure, but the increased frontal beta to alpha ratio (measure of arousal) corresponded to increased emotional ratings. These results suggest that EEG may be a reliable method and a promising tool for the investigation of group musical pleasure through musical reward processing.
Highlights
The power of music over human emotions is intriguing and there is an ongoing debate regarding not the mechanisms of how music can provoke pleasure but rather why music can be a rewarding experience (Goupil and Aucouturier, 2019)
It appears that chills reported during the listening by participants did not always match with the peak pleasure previously indicated by the participant
Post hoc analysis revealed that power spectral density (PSD) values were significantly lower for Chills versus Low pleasure (RC regions of interest (ROIs) p = 0.042; right temporal (RT) ROI p = 0.004) and the PSD values were significantly higher for Chills versus Low pleasure for the right pre-frontal (RPF) ROI (p = 0.046)
Summary
The power of music over human emotions is intriguing and there is an ongoing debate regarding not the mechanisms of how music can provoke pleasure but rather why music can be a rewarding experience (Goupil and Aucouturier, 2019). A pharmacological study by Ferreri et al (2019) demonstrated that dopaminergic releases were the consequence but one of the causes of the felt emotional pleasure These cerebral investigations remain limited to laboratory experiments with heavy neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, PET scan) whereas social neurosciences, and the study of collective emotions, is moving toward natural/ecological paradigms (Acquadro et al, 2016; Volpe et al, 2016; Dikker et al, 2017; Bevilacqua et al, 2018; Soto et al, 2018; Swarbrick et al, 2018; Matusz et al, 2019). The use of mobile wireless EEG could provide the possibility of studying cerebral activity during peak emotion of musical chills in ecological/natural conditions, especially because it can be used in hyperscanning paradigms with several participants simultaneously (Lindenberger et al, 2009; Müller et al, 2013, 2018; Sänger et al, 2013; Acquadro et al, 2016)
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