Music, emotion, and the reward system: investigations with [11C] raclopride positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and psychophysiological methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Music is arguably one of the most potent natural rewards. In this thesis, we examine the brain's response to music through different imaging methods to investigate how musical sounds can be interpreted as pleasurable by a listener. First, we examine the hypothesis that rewarding responses to music are related to emotional arousal. Using self-selected "chill-inducing" music, we measure emotional arousal objectively through psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, revealing a robust and direct positive relationship between increases in emotion and self-reported pleasure. Next, we investigate the hypothesis that the intense emotional responses to music may be targeting the brain's reward systems (mesostriatal dopamine circuitry), which have evolved to reinforce highly adaptive behaviours. We use [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography to measure dopamine activity during music listening, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the temporal dynamics of activity in mesostriatal regions. The results provide the first evidence for dopamine release in the ventral striatal regions (specifically, the nucleus accumbens; NAcc) during peak moments of pleasure to music (objectively marked by experience of chills). Furthermore, we demonstrate a temporal distinction in dopaminergic activity as dopamine is released in the dorsal striatal regions in anticipation of the peak pleasure responses, suggesting that expectations and anticipation play an important role in musical pleasure. Finally, in the third study we use fMRI to take a closer look at the dynamic interactions between different brain regions that give rise to musical pleasure when a piece of music is novel, but considered desirable by an individual. The findings of this study reveal that activity in the NAcc during initial listening of music can predict whether that piece of music will be considered rewarding to an individual and subsequently purchased. Moreover, while increased activity in sensory and valuation areas of the brain does not predict reward value of the music, the connectivity of these regions, namely the auditory cortices, ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortices, and amygdala, with the NAcc predicts whether a piece of music will be subsequently purchased. These findings suggest that musical pleasure is a complex process involving highly integrated connectivity between ancient reward circuits in the brain and more recently evolved cortical areas involved in higher-order cognitive processes.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".