Musical Stimuli Research Articles

Identification of the Features of Emotional Dysfunction in Female Individuals With Methamphetamine Use Disorder Measured by Musical Stimuli Modulated Startle Reflex.

Emotional dysregulation contributes to the development of substance use disorders (SUDs) and is highly associated with drug abuse and relapse. Music as a contextual auditory stimulus can effectively stimulate the reward circuitry, modulate memory associated with drug taking, and enhance emotional experiences during drug taking. However, the studies of the emotional responses to music in individuals with SUDs are scarce. Using startle reflex and self-reports, this study assessed the psychophysiological and cognitive emotional responses (i.e., valence, arousal and proximity) to happy, peaceful, and fearful music stimuli in 30 females with methamphetamine use disorder (MUD) and 30 healthy females. The results found that participants with MUD showed an inhibited startle response to fearful music compared to normal controls (t = 3.7, p < 0.01), and no significant differences were found in the startle responses to happy and peaceful music between the two groups. For the self-reported ratings, participants with MUD showed a decreased arousal in the response to fearful (t = 4.1, p < 0.01) and happy music (t = 3.8, p < 0.01), an increased valence in the response to fearful music (t = 4.4, p < 0.01), and a higher level of proximity in the response to fearful (t = 3.8, p < 0.01) and happy music (t = 2.2, p = 0.03). No significant differences were found in the rating of arousal to peaceful music, the valence to happy and peaceful music, as well as the proximity to peaceful music between the two groups. The females with MUD showed attenuated psychophysiological response and potentiated cognitive response (i.e., valence, arousal) to fearful music, as well as a high proximity to musical stimuli with high arousal regardless of its valence. These results have important implications for promoting the effectiveness of assessment and therapy selections for female MUD patients with impaired emotion regulation.

Did You Hear the Vocalist? Differences in Processing Between Short Segments of Familiar and Unfamiliar Music

Previous research indicates that people gain musical information from short (250 ms) segments of music. This study extended previous findings by presenting shorter (100 ms, 150 ms, and 200 ms) segments of Western popular music in rapid temporal arrays; similar to scanning through music listening options. The question remains, is there a critical feature, such as the song’s vocalist, that listeners used when processing the complex timbral arrangements of Western popular music? Participants were presented with familiar and unfamiliar music segments, four segments in succession. Each trial contained a female or a male vocalist, or was purely instrumental. Participants were asked whether they heard a vocalist (Experiment 1) or a female vocalist (Experiment 2) in one of the four music segments. Vocalist detection in Experiment 1 was well above chance for the shortest stimuli (100 ms), and performance was better in the familiar trials than the unfamiliar. When instructed in Experiment 2 to detect a female vocalist, however, participants performed better with the unfamiliar trials than the familiar trials. Together, these findings suggest that the vocalist and vocalist gender may be stored as separate features and their utility differs based on one’s familiarity with the musical stimulus.

Different Types of Sounds and Their Relationship With the Electrocardiographic Signals and the Cardiovascular System - Review.

Background: For some time now, the effects of sound, noise, and music on the human body have been studied. However, despite research done through time, it is still not completely clear what influence, interaction, and effects sounds have on human body. That is why it is necessary to conduct new research on this topic. Thus, in this paper, a systematic review is undertaken in order to integrate research related to several types of sound, both pleasant and unpleasant, specifically noise and music. In addition, it includes as much research as possible to give stakeholders a more general vision about relevant elements regarding methodologies, study subjects, stimulus, analysis, and experimental designs in general. This study has been conducted in order to make a genuine contribution to this area and to perhaps to raise the quality of future research about sound and its effects over ECG signals.Methods: This review was carried out by independent researchers, through three search equations, in four different databases, including: engineering, medicine, and psychology. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied and studies published between 1999 and 2017 were considered. The selected documents were read and analyzed independently by each group of researchers and subsequently conclusions were established between all of them.Results: Despite the differences between the outcomes of selected studies, some common factors were found among them. Thus, in noise studies where both BP and HR increased or tended to increase, it was noted that HRV (HF and LF/HF) changes with both sound and noise stimuli, whereas GSR changes with sound and musical stimuli. Furthermore, LF also showed changes with exposure to noise.Conclusion: In many cases, samples displayed a limitation in experimental design, and in diverse studies, there was a lack of a control group. There was a lot of variability in the presented stimuli providing a wide overview of the effects they could produce in humans. In the listening sessions, there were numerous examples of good practice in experimental design, such as the use of headphones and comfortable positions for study subjects, while the listening sessions lasted 20 min in most of the studies.

The neural underpinnings of music listening under different attention conditions.

Most studies examining the neural underpinnings of music listening have no specific instruction on how to process the presented musical pieces. In this study, we explicitly manipulated the participants' focus of attention while they listened to the musical pieces. We used an ecologically valid experimental setting by presenting the musical stimuli simultaneously with naturalistic film sequences. In one condition, the participants were instructed to focus their attention on the musical piece (attentive listening), whereas in the second condition, the participants directed their attention to the film sequence (passive listening). We used two instrumental musical pieces: an electronic pop song, which was a major hit at the time of testing, and a classical musical piece. During music presentation, we measured electroencephalographic oscillations and responses from the autonomic nervous system (heart rate and high-frequency heart rate variability). During passive listening to the pop song, we found strong event-related synchronizations in all analyzed frequency bands (theta, lower alpha, upper alpha, lower beta, and upper beta). The neurophysiological responses during attentive listening to the pop song were similar to those of the classical musical piece during both listening conditions. Thus, the focus of attention had a strong influence on the neurophysiological responses to the pop song, but not on the responses to the classical musical piece. The electroencephalographic responses during passive listening to the pop song are interpreted as a neurophysiological and psychological state typically observed when the participants are 'drawn into the music'.

Eye on Music Reading: A Methodological Review of Studies from 1994 to 2017.

In this review, we focus on the methodological aspects of eye-tracking research in the domain of music, published and/or available between 1994 and 2017, and we identify potentially fruitful next steps to increase coherence and systematicity within this emerging field. We review and discuss choices of musical stimuli, the conditions under which these were performed (i.e. control of performance tempo and music-reading protocols), performer’s level of musical expertise, and handling of performance errors and eye-movement data. We propose that despite a lack of methodological coherence in research to date, careful reflection on earlier methodological choices can help in formulating future research questions and in positioning new work. These steps would represent progress towards a cumulative research tradition, where joint understanding is built by systematic and consistent use of stimuli, research settings and methods of analysis.

Food approach conditioning and discrimination learning using sound cues in benthic sharks.

The marine environment is filled with biotic and abiotic sounds. Some of these sounds predict important events that influence fitness while others are unimportant. Individuals can learn specific sound cues and 'soundscapes' and use them for vital activities such as foraging, predator avoidance, communication and orientation. Most research with sounds in elasmobranchs has focused on hearing thresholds and attractiveness to sound sources, but very little is known about their abilities to learn about sounds, especially in benthic species. Here we investigated if juvenile Port Jackson sharks could learn to associate a musical stimulus with a food reward, discriminate between two distinct musical stimuli, and whether individual personality traits were linked to cognitive performance. Five out of eight sharks were successfully conditioned to associate a jazz song with a food reward delivered in a specific corner of the tank. We observed repeatable individual differences in activity and boldness in all eight sharks, but these personality traits were not linked to the learning performance assays we examined. These sharks were later trained in a discrimination task, where they had to distinguish between the same jazz and a novel classical music song, and swim to opposite corners of the tank according to the stimulus played. The sharks' performance to the jazz stimulus declined to chance levels in the discrimination task. Interestingly, some sharks developed a strong side bias to the right, which in some cases was not the correct side for the jazz stimulus.

Overcoming Bias: Cognitive Control Reduces Susceptibility to Framing Effects in Evaluating Musical Performance

Prior expectations can bias evaluative judgments of sensory information. We show that information about a performer’s status can bias the evaluation of musical stimuli, reflected by differential activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Moreover, we demonstrate that decreased susceptibility to this confirmation bias is (a) accompanied by the recruitment of and (b) correlated with the white-matter structure of the executive control network, particularly related to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). By using long-duration musical stimuli, we were able to track the initial biasing, subsequent perception, and ultimate evaluation of the stimuli, examining the full evolution of these biases over time. Our findings confirm the persistence of confirmation bias effects even when ample opportunity exists to gather information about true stimulus quality, and underline the importance of executive control in reducing bias.

Optimal Tempo for Groove: Its Relation to Directions of Body Movement and Japanese nori.

The tendency for groove-based music to induce body movements has been linked to multiple acoustical factors. However, it is unclear how or whether tempo affects groove, although tempo significantly affects other aspects of music perception. To address this issue, the present study investigated effects of tempo, specific rhythmic organizations of patterns, and syncopation on groove and the induction of the sensation of wanting to move. We focused on the directions of body movement in particular by taking into account nori, which is an indigenous Japanese musical term used not only synonymously with groove, but also as a spatial metaphor indicating vertical or horizontal movement directions. Thus, the present study explored how groove was felt and defined, as well as how musical factors induced the sensation of wanting to move in cross-cultural context. A listening experiment was conducted using drum breaks as stimuli. Stimuli consisted of various rhythm patterns at six tempi from 60 to 200 BPM. The main findings are that: (1) an optimal tempo for groove existed for drum breaks at around 100–120 BPM, (2) an optimal tempo existed for the sensation of wanting to move the body in specific directions (i.e., back-and-forth and side-to-side), (3) groove and nori shared a similar concept of wanting to move but differed on several points (i.e., association with sense of pulse and fast tempo). Overall, the present study suggests that there is an optimal tempo for body movement related to groove. This finding has implications for the use of music or rhythmic stimuli to induce smooth motion in rehabilitation, therapy, or dance.

Neurophysiological Effects of Trait Empathy in Music Listening.

The social cognitive basis of music processing has long been noted, and recent research has shown that trait empathy is linked to musical preferences and listening style. Does empathy modulate neural responses to musical sounds? We designed two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to address this question. In Experiment 1, subjects listened to brief isolated musical timbres while being scanned. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to excerpts of music in four conditions (familiar liked (FL)/disliked and unfamiliar liked (UL)/disliked). For both types of musical stimuli, emotional and cognitive forms of trait empathy modulated activity in sensorimotor and cognitive areas: in the first experiment, empathy was primarily correlated with activity in supplementary motor area (SMA), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and insula; in Experiment 2, empathy was mainly correlated with activity in prefrontal, temporo-parietal and reward areas. Taken together, these findings reveal the interactions between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms of empathy in response to musical sounds, in line with recent findings from other cognitive domains.

27.1 TRANSLATIONAL EVIDENCE OF DOPAMINE-RELATED ALTERATIONS OF BASAL GANGLIA AND THALAMO-CORTICAL NEUROCIRCUITRY IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: A FULL CLINIC-TO-BENCH-TO-CLINIC BACK-TRANSLATION

BackgroundRecent work with a dopamine 2 receptor (D2R) over-expressing (D2R-OE) mouse has suggested that this receptor over-expression leads to a highly plastic increase in bridging collaterals from the associative striatum (AST) to the external segment of the globus pallidus (GPe). Because of the densely interconnected nature of basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical signaling circuitry, we hypothesized and demonstrated in a recent publication that the resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) of AST to multiple cortical and thalamic subregions is broadly disrupted in unmedicated patients with schizophrenia. In this talk, I will present novel simultaneous multi-slice (aka “multiband”) fMRI data that provides the spatial resolution necessary to image smaller basal ganglia substructures (such as the GPe/GPi), and show that unmedicated patients with schizophrenia exhibit specifically disrupted AST-GPe connectivity, as predicted directly from the D2R-OE mouse model findings.In addition, recent work with a 22q11 deletion mouse, which models a similar syndrome in humans that is strongly associated with schizophrenia, has shown that these mice exhibit a D2R-mediated reduction in the strength of excitatory post-synaptic potentials in primary auditory cortex in response to stimulation of the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN) of the thalamus. Consistent with this finding, I will present multiband fMRI data that employs both RSFC and an audio-visual localizer task to demonstrate a specific reduction in RSFC between the MGN and primary auditory cortex, consistent with these findings in the 22q11 mouse.MethodsPartially-overlapping samples of 19 and 14 unmedicated patients with schizophrenia and 15 and 16 matched healthy participants participated in two sets of studies. For both studies, multiband fMRI images were acquired on a GE MR 750 system at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, with a multiband acceleration factor of 6, 2 mm isotropic voxel resolution, and 850 ms TR. Thirty minutes of RSFC data was collected in each participant, and participants in the auditory study also completed a 15 minute audio-visual localizer task that employed sparse temporal sampling with either auditory (9 seconds of a randomized and rapidly-varying musical stimulus) or visual (7.5 Hz alternating checkerboard) stimulation between each acquisition cluster. Basal ganglia subregions were identified via manual drawings conducted by an experienced rater, and the MGN and LGN were identified using the audio-visual localizer task.ResultsUnmedicated patients with schizophrenia showed a significant reduction in RSFC strength between the dorsal caudate and GPe (Cohen’s d = 0.87, P = 0.017), but no other striatal or pallidal subregion pairs, consistent with a specific alteration in anatomical projections between these two regions. In addition, patients with schizophrenia showed a reduction in RSFC between the MGN and primary auditory cortex, as well as between the LGN and primary visual cortex (P < 0.05, alphasim corrected for whole-brain analysis).DiscussionThese findings provide initial support for the existence of D2R-mediated alterations in functional neuroanatomy, first observed in animal models of schizophrenia, in a clinical sample of unmedicated patients. In addition to providing early evidence for potential mechanisms of psychotic phenomena, this work suggests that the use of non-invasive multiband RSFC is a promising approach to translating basic neuroscience findings in animal models back into a clinical setting. Altered circuitry was shown in the D2OE mice to underlie motivational deficits, and we propose that they may have a similar functional impact in patients.

Experimental effects of acute exercise and music listening on cognitive creativity

ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to extend previous experimental work suggesting that both exercise and music-based interventions may influence creativity processes, by investigating the independent influences of exercise or music stimuli on verbal creative performances in the laboratory environment. Methods32 students at the University of Mississippi participated in this within-subject intervention, which included three laboratory visits per participant. Individuals participated in three 15-min, randomized experimental conditions: Treadmill walking, self-selected music, or a seated control period, and subsequently completed four creativity assessments during each visit (three tests of divergent thinking, and one test of convergent thinking), with the order of divergent thinking tasks counterbalanced. Creativity task performance was independently scored across four dependent parameters, which included fluency (i.e., total number of ideas), flexibility (i.e., total number of categories), originality (i.e., responses thought of by <5% of the sample), and elaboration (i.e., degree of supplementary detail included per idea). ResultsRepeated Measures ANOVAs indicated that creativity scores for fluency (F(2, 60) = 0.63, p = 0.94), flexibility (F(2, 60) = 0.64, p = 0.53), originality (F(2, 60 = 0.23, p = 0.78), and elaboration (F(2, 60) = 2.74, p = 0.07), were not statistically significant across the visits. ConclusionsThese findings add to the equivocal body of creativity research, uniquely assessing the effects of exercise and music on verbal creativity performance. The present study further highlights the critical need for improvement in the assessment and evaluation of laboratory-assessed cognitive creativity. Methodological strategies must be examined and refined for the meaningful and credible measurement and interpretation of experimental creativity.

On application of kernel PCA for generating stimulus features for fMRI during continuous music listening

BackgroundThere has been growing interest towards naturalistic neuroimaging experiments, which deepen our understanding of how human brain processes and integrates incoming streams of multifaceted sensory information, as commonly occurs in real world. Music is a good example of such complex continuous phenomenon. In a few recent fMRI studies examining neural correlates of music in continuous listening settings, multiple perceptual attributes of music stimulus were represented by a set of high-level features, produced as the linear combination of the acoustic descriptors computationally extracted from the stimulus audio. New methodfMRI data from naturalistic music listening experiment were employed here. Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) was applied to acoustic descriptors extracted from the stimulus audio to generate a set of nonlinear stimulus features. Subsequently, perceptual and neural correlates of the generated high-level features were examined. ResultsThe generated features captured musical percepts that were hidden from the linear PCA features, namely Rhythmic Complexity and Event Synchronicity. Neural correlates of the new features revealed activations associated to processing of complex rhythms, including auditory, motor, and frontal areas. Comparison with existing methodResults were compared with the findings in the previously published study, which analyzed the same fMRI data but applied linear PCA for generating stimulus features. To enable comparison of the results, methodology for finding stimulus-driven functional maps was adopted from the previous study. ConclusionsExploiting nonlinear relationships among acoustic descriptors can lead to the novel high-level stimulus features, which can in turn reveal new brain structures involved in music processing.

Examining the auditory cortex response to musical stimuli with differences in timbre and reverberation

In a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by the authors, the addition of reverberation was shown to degrade the cortical auditory response to musical stimuli. This degradation may occur since reverberation blurs the frequency content of the stimuli in time, making it more difficult for the brain to distinguish between distinct auditory objects. The current study aims to further establish the auditory response to reverberant stimuli by investigating if higher-order frequency content (timbre) affects the auditory cortex’s sensitivity to reverberation. Using an anechoic solo-instrumental trumpet motif, a sine-trumpet musical stimulus was generated by removing the harmonic content from the played notes while maintaining the attack of the instrument and rhythm of the musical passage. Auralizations of both motifs were created from eight simulated room conditions with reverberation times ranging from 0.0-7.2 s. Participants were recruited to rate the auralizations in terms of overall preference, perceived reverberance, and perceived clarity. Subsequently, the participants listened to a subset of the solo-instrumental and sine-trumpet auralizations in an MRI machine. Contrasts between the motifs and room acoustic conditions were analyzed to confirm the sensitivity of the auditory cortex to reverberation, as well as investigate the possible interaction effect between reverberation and timbre.

Effects of accelerated human music on learning and memory performance of rats

A total of forty, 7-week-old male rats were exposed to the ‘rodentized’ version (twice as fast as and one octave higher than the original) of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major for ten minutes a day for 10 weeks. One group (10 rats) received the musical stimuli before (‘B’), another during (‘D’) and the third before and during (‘BD’) the memory test, while the ten control (‘C’) animals were kept in silence. The animals’ spatial learning and memory ability was tested in an 8-arm radial maze. Rats exposed to the music showed a significant (7.1%) improvement in task acquisition (Group BD), but it did not practically change in Group D and worsened by 10.5% in Group B. The 2-h working memory significantly improved by 12.1% (BD) while practically did not change in Groups B and D. The reference memory improved by 11.9% in Group BD, but did not change in Group B and D, compared to the Control. The performance of the groups during the 4-h working memory test did not differ significantly. During the long-term test period the spatial memory performance of the music-exposed rats did not show significant differences compared to the Control (Table 1). At the same time, most results obtained in the long-term period were better than the corresponding short-term data. In conclusion, this particular piece of music, falling within the rats’ hearing range, was suitable for improving hippocampus-dependent spatial learning capacity, but only if the animals were exposed to it not only before but also during the task.

The auditory cortex hosts network nodes influential for emotion processing: An fMRI study on music-evoked fear and joy

Sound is a potent elicitor of emotions. Auditory core, belt and parabelt regions have anatomical connections to a large array of limbic and paralimbic structures which are involved in the generation of affective activity. However, little is known about the functional role of auditory cortical regions in emotion processing. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and music stimuli that evoke joy or fear, our study reveals that anterior and posterior regions of auditory association cortex have emotion-characteristic functional connectivity with limbic/paralimbic (insula, cingulate cortex, and striatum), somatosensory, visual, motor-related, and attentional structures. We found that these regions have remarkably high emotion-characteristic eigenvector centrality, revealing that they have influential positions within emotion-processing brain networks with “small-world” properties. By contrast, primary auditory fields showed surprisingly strong emotion-characteristic functional connectivity with intra-auditory regions. Our findings demonstrate that the auditory cortex hosts regions that are influential within networks underlying the affective processing of auditory information. We anticipate our results to incite research specifying the role of the auditory cortex—and sensory systems in general—in emotion processing, beyond the traditional view that sensory cortices have merely perceptual functions.

Musical auditory stimulus acutely influences heart rate dynamic responses to medication in subjects with well-controlled hypertension

Music can improve the efficiency of medical treatment when correctly associated with drug action, reducing risk factors involving deteriorating cardiac function. We evaluated the effect of musical auditory stimulus associated with anti-hypertensive medication on heart rate (HR) autonomic control in hypertensive subjects. We evaluated 37 well-controlled hypertensive patients designated for anti-hypertensive medication. Heart rate variability (HRV) was calculated from the HR monitor recordings of two different, randomly sorted protocols (control and music) on two separate days. Patients were examined in a resting condition 10 minutes before medication and 20 minutes, 40 minutes and 60 minutes after oral medication. Music was played throughout the 60 minutes after medication with the same intensity for all subjects in the music protocol. We noted analogous response of systolic and diastolic arterial pressure in both protocols. HR decreased 60 minutes after medication in the music protocol while it remained unchanged in the control protocol. The effects of anti-hypertensive medication on SDNN (Standard deviation of all normal RR intervals), LF (low frequency, nu), HF (high frequency, nu) and alpha-1 scale were more intense in the music protocol. In conclusion, musical auditory stimulus increased HR autonomic responses to anti-hypertensive medication in well-controlled hypertensive subjects.

Unusualness as a predictor of music preference

This paper investigates the role of unusualness ratings in predicting music preference. In addition, the variables complexity and familiarity were rated for five music stimuli covering a range of styles. Ninety-four participants were exposed to each stimulus ten times over a three-week period. The three variables were tested as predictors of preference using linear and quadratic curve-fitting procedures. A linear increasing relationship was observed for familiarity, and inverted-U relationships were observed for unusualness and complexity. These results are consistent with Berlyne’s inverted-U model, or a segment of the inverted-U in the case of familiarity. Unusualness was a good indicator of music preference, and explained more variance than complexity or familiarity. Furthermore, the two stimuli that scored highest in unusualness produced consistently low ratings of preference independent of exposure, which appears to be a hallmark of “extreme” music stimuli.

Effects of Prolonged Tasks and Rest Patterns on Driver's Visual Behaviors, Driving Performance, and Sleepiness Awareness in Tunnel Environments: A Simulator Study

Driving sleepiness is one of the most important potential causes of traffic accidents, especially for long-distance drivers under monotonous conditions. In this study, 68 professional, male coach drivers were recruited to participate in 2-, 3-, and 4-h driving tasks on a simulated mountainous expressway and then were given a 15- or 30-min rest with or without music stimulus to recover. At the end of each driving task and rest period, the driver’s eye movement indicators, driving performance measures, and subjective sleepiness level were examined via eye tracking device, performance testers, and the Stanford Sleepiness Scale, respectively. One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the variation of each variable at different stages. The statistical analysis revealed that the driving duration and rest patterns have significant impacts on the driver’s visual behaviors and driving performance. The participants’ blink duration, eye closure duration, reaction time, number of incorrect action judgments, and subjective level of sleepiness significantly changed as driving time increased. Drivers recovered sufficiently after a general 30-min rest or a 15-min rest with music after 2- and 3-h driving tasks, but required a 30-min rest with music as stimulus after 4-h driving task. These results provide insight into potential strategies for traffic safety improvements among long-distance drivers.

Impact of affective picture and music stimuli on autonomic responses: characterisation of pauses between emotion blocks

The main goal of this study was to investigate the role of stimulus contents on physiological responses. Usually some pauses between the incentives are considered in an experiment to bring the physiological signals to the base. However, the role of these halts on emotional responses has not been carefully evaluated so far. Therefore, in the current study the effect of pauses between emotional blocks of an inducement was inspected. To this effect, autonomic signals were recorded using two emotion elicitation paradigms: image induction and music excerpts. Several standard and nonlinear features were extracted. The Mann-Whitney U-test was employed to determine the significant differences between the pause segments and rest condition. The results of this study indicated that pause duration between affective blocks of stimuli has a great impact on the emotional autonomic responses. The importance of specialised protocol designing for a specific biomedical signal is concluded from the findings.

Impact of affective picture and music stimuli on autonomic responses: characterisation of pauses between emotion blocks

The main goal of this study was to investigate the role of stimulus contents on physiological responses. Usually some pauses between the incentives are considered in an experiment to bring the physiological signals to the base. However, the role of these halts on emotional responses has not been carefully evaluated so far. Therefore, in the current study the effect of pauses between emotional blocks of an inducement was inspected. To this effect, autonomic signals were recorded using two emotion elicitation paradigms: image induction and music excerpts. Several standard and nonlinear features were extracted. The Mann-Whitney U-test was employed to determine the significant differences between the pause segments and rest condition. The results of this study indicated that pause duration between affective blocks of stimuli has a great impact on the emotional autonomic responses. The importance of specialised protocol designing for a specific biomedical signal is concluded from the findings.