The role of opioid transmission in music‐induced pleasure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies conducted in rodents indicate a crucial role of the opioid circuit in mediating objective hedonic reactions to primary rewards. However, it remains unclear whether opioid transmission is also essential to experience pleasure with more abstract rewards, such as music. We addressed this question using a double-blind within-subject pharmacological design in which opioid levels were up- and downregulated by administering an opioid agonist (oxycodone) and antagonist (naltrexone), respectively, before healthy participants (n = 21) listened to music. Participants also performed a monetary incentive delay (MID) task to control for the effectiveness of the treatment and the specificity of the effects. Our results revealed that the pharmacological intervention did not modulate subjective reports of pleasure, nor the occurrence of chills. On the contrary, psychophysiological (objective) measures of emotional arousal, such as skin conductance responses (SCRs), were bidirectionally modulated in both the music and MID tasks. This modulation specifically occurred during reward consumption, with greater pleasure-related SCR following oxycodone than naltrexone. These findings indicate that opioid transmission does not modulate subjective evaluations but rather affects objective reward-related psychophysiological responses. These findings raise new caveats about the role of the opioidergic system in the modulation of pleasure for more abstract or cognitive forms of rewarding experiences, such as music.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".