The Activation of Human Affective System During Passive Music Listening: A Preliminary fMRI Study / 中国临床心理学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective: To localize the functional areas related to music processing with fMRI,and to discuss the possible neural mechanism underlying emotion experience and music therapy.Methods: Thirty healthy non-musicians underwent fMRI study.Experimental tasks included listening passively to instrumental pieces of scale,pleasant classic music and scary music(3 pieces each),which were given in block design.Conjunction analysis was performed with SPM99 to render the mean functional images.Results: Both the pleasant music and the scary music activated the neural substrates underlying affective processing;the former mainly included bilateral lateral prefrontal cortex(left advantage),the left orbitofrontal cortex,the anterior cingulate cortex,the left anterior part of insula,the right thalamus and the left lenticula;the later mainly included bilateral lateral prefrontal cortex(right advantage),bilateral orbitofrontal cortex,bilateral medial frontal gyri,bilateral anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral amygdaloid complex.Conclusion: Passively listening to pleasant and scary music could strongly activate distinct emotion processing substrates,and the positive emotion processing system activation during pleasant music listening may be one of the neural mechanisms of music therapy.