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Music-induced changes in functional cerebral asymmetries

Hausmann, Markus, Hodgetts, Sophie and Eerola, Tuomas (2016) Music-induced changes in functional cerebral asymmetries. Brain and Cognition, 104. pp. 58-71. ISSN 0278-2626

Item Type: Article

Abstract

After decades of research, it remains unclear whether emotion lateralization occurs because one hemisphere is dominant for processing the emotional content of the stimuli, or whether emotional stimuli activate lateralised networks associated with the subjective emotional experience. By using emotion-induction procedures, we investigated the effect of listening to happy and sad music on three well-established lateralization tasks. In a prestudy, Mozart's piano sonata (K. 448) and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata were rated as the most happy and sad excerpts, respectively. Participants listened to either one emotional excerpt, or sat in silence before completing an emotional chimeric faces task (Experiment 1), visual line bisection task (Experiment 2) and a dichotic listening task (Experiment 3 and 4). Listening to happy music resulted in a reduced right hemispheric bias in facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) and visuospatial attention (Experiment 2) and increased left hemispheric bias in language lateralization (Experiments 3 and 4). Although Experiments 1-3 revealed an increased positive emotional state after listening to happy music, mediation analyses revealed that the effect on hemispheric asymmetries was not mediated by music-induced emotional changes. The direct effect of music listening on lateralization was investigated in Experiment 4 in which tempo of the happy excerpt was manipulated by controlling for other acoustic features. However, the results of Experiment 4 made it rather unlikely that tempo is the critical cue accounting for the effects. We conclude that listening to music can affect functional cerebral asymmetries in well-established emotional and cognitive laterality tasks, independent of music-induced changes in the emotion state.

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More Information

Depositing User: Sophie Hodgetts

Identifiers

Item ID: 8636
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2016.03.001
ISSN: 0278-2626
URI: http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/8636
Official URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/...

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Catalogue record

Date Deposited: 22 Jan 2018 17:15
Last Modified: 18 Dec 2019 16:05

Contributors

Author: Markus Hausmann
Author: Sophie Hodgetts
Author: Tuomas Eerola

University Divisions

Faculty of Health Sciences and Wellbeing
Faculty of Health Sciences and Wellbeing > School of Psychology

Subjects

Psychology > Cognitive Behaviour
Psychology > Neuropsychology
Psychology > Psychology
Psychology

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