What is the role of emotions in aesthetic experience? This is an important question for researchers attempting to clarify the neurobiological underpinnings of our appreciation of different art forms. Peak emotional responses, or chills, however, have mostly been studied in the context of the enjoyment of music. A recent study by Valorie Salimpoor and colleagues, still in press in Nature Neuroscience, showed that peak emotional experiences while people listened to music was associated with dopamine release in the striatum. The authors’ examination of the time course of this association revealed that anticipation of the emotional peak was related with dopamine release in the caudate and its experience with release in the nucleus accumbens. Thus, the study shows a neural dissociation between two important emotional constituents of our enjoyment of music: the intensely rewarding experiences and their anticipation. Read the study here.
Author: Marcos
Upcoming Special Issue on Brain and Art
The open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience will be hosting a Special Topic on Brain and Art edited by Idan Segev, Luis M. Martinez and Robert J. Zatorre. The deadline for full article submission is 15 May 2011. Don’t miss it!