Emotion recognition in music changes across the adult life span

In comparison with other modalities, the recognition of emotion in music has received little attention. An unexplored question is whether and how emotion recognition in music changes as a function of ageing. In the present study, healthy adults aged between 17 and 84 years (N=114) judged the magnitude to which a set of musical excerpts (Vieillard et al., 2008) expressed happiness, peacefulness, sadness and fear/threat. The results revealed emotion-specific age-related changes: advancing age was associated with a gradual decrease in responsiveness to sad and scary music from middle age onwards, whereas the recognition of happiness and peacefulness, both positive emotional qualities, remained stable from young adulthood to older age. Additionally, the number of years of music training was associated with more accurate categorisation of the musical emotions examined here. We argue that these findings are consistent with two accounts on how ageing might influence the recognition of emotions: motivational changes towards positivity and, to a lesser extent, selective neuropsychological decline.

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title: Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music
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title: Facial expression recognition across the adult life span
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title: Age differences in recognition of emotion in lexical stimuli and facial expressions.
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title: Similar patterns of age-related differences in emotion recognition from speech and music
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title: Regional brain changes in aging healthy adults: general trends, individual differences and modifiers.
abstract: Brain aging research relies mostly on cross-sectional studies, which infer true changes from age differences. We present longitudinal measures of five-year change in the regional brain volumes in healthy adults. Average and individual differences in volume changes and the effects of age, sex and hypertension were assessed with latent difference score modeling. The caudate, the cerebellum, the hippocampus and the association cortices shrunk substantially. There was minimal change in the entorhinal and none in the primary visual cortex. Longitudinal measures of shrinkage exceeded cross-sectional estimates. All regions except the inferior parietal lobule showed individual differences in change. Shrinkage of the cerebellum decreased from young to middle adulthood, and increased from middle adulthood to old age. Shrinkage of the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortices, the inferior temporal cortex and the prefrontal white matter increased with age. Moreover, shrinkage in the hippocampus and the cerebellum accelerated with age. In the hippocampus, both linear and quadratic trends in incremental age-related shrinkage were limited to the hypertensive participants. Individual differences in shrinkage correlated across some regions, suggesting common causes. No sex differences in age trends except for the caudate were observed. We found no evidence of neuroprotective effects of larger brain size or educational attainment.

title: The aging brain.
abstract: Aging is accompanied by cognitive decline in a major segment of the population and is the primary risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and other prevalent neurodegenerative disorders. Despite this central role in disease pathogenesis and morbidity, the aging of the brain has not been well understood at a molecular level. This review seeks to integrate what is known about age-related cognitive and neuroanatomical changes with recent advances in understanding basic molecular mechanisms that underlie aging. An important issue is how normal brain aging transitions to pathological aging, giving rise to neurodegenerative disorders. Toxic protein aggregates have been identified as potential contributory factors, including amyloid beta-protein in Alzheimer's disease, tau in frontotemporal dementia, and alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease. However, current models of pathogenesis do not explain the origin of the common sporadic forms of these diseases or address the critical nexus between aging and disease. This review discusses potential approaches to unifying the systems biology of the aging brain with the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration.

title: At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition
abstract: Divergent trajectories characterize the aging mind: Processing capacity declines, while judgment, knowledge, and emotion regulation are relatively spared. We maintain that these different developmental trajectories have implications for emotion–cognition interactions. Following an overview of our theoretical position, we review empirical studies indicating that (a) older adults evidence superior cognitive performance for emotional relative to non-emotional information, (b) age differences are most evident when the emotional content is positively as opposed to negatively valenced, and (c) differences can be accounted for by changes in motivation posited in socioemotional selectivity theory.

title: Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory
abstract: As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions. Strategic processes in older adults' emotional attention and memory might play a role in this variation with age. Older adults show more emotionally gratifying memory distortion for past choices and autobiographical information than younger adults do. In addition, when shown stimuli that vary in affective valence, positive items account for a larger proportion of older adults' subsequent memories than those of younger adults. This positivity effect in older adults' memories seems to be due to their greater focus on emotion regulation and to be implemented by cognitive control mechanisms that enhance positive and diminish negative information. These findings suggest that both cognitive abilities and motivation contribute to older adults' improved emotion regulation.

title: Age‐related differences in the medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces as revealed by fMRI
abstract: Age‐related differences involved in the neural substrates of emotional face perception were investigated in young and old healthy volunteers. The subjects were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were judging the gender of faces with negative, positive, or neutral emotional valence. The results showed that both the predominant activation in young subjects and reduced activity in old subjects contributed to a significant age difference in the left amygdala during the perception of negative faces. Activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus during the perception of positive faces diminished with advancing age. Neural activity in the angular gyrus and lingual gyrus of the right hemisphere was reduced in the old subjects during the perception of positive faces. There was no region where old subjects had greater activity than young subjects during the task. In old subjects, the overall activity in the right hippocampus during the task correlated negatively with age, whereas the activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus correlated positively with neuropsychological performance. There was no significant correlation between subjects' characteristics and signal change in young subjects. These results indicate the age‐associated vulnerability of the medial temporal lobe structures including the amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus during face perception. The dissociation with reduced activity in the left amygdala and the right parahippocampal gyrus may suggest that aging differentially affects neural responses to faces with negative or positive emotional valence. The parieto‐occipital lobe, which has been found to be involved in face processing, also showed a functional decline associated with aging. Hippocampus 2002;12:352–362.

title: Effects of aging on functional connectivity of the amygdala during negative evaluation: A network analysis of fMRI data
abstract: Previous evidence has suggested both preserved emotional function in aging and age-related differences in emotional processing, but the neural networks underlying such processing alterations in the context of preserved affective function are not clear. Using event-related fMRI, we scanned young and older adults while they made valence ratings for emotional pictures. Behavioral results showed a similar pattern of emotional evaluation, but older adults experienced negatively valenced pictures as being less negative. Consistent with behavioral findings, we identified common activity in the right amygdala, but age-related differences in the functional connectivity of this region with the rest of the brain. Compared to young adults, older adults had greater functional connectivity between the right amygdala and ventral anterior cingulate cortex, possibly reflecting increased emotional regulation. Conversely, older adults showed decreased functional connectivity with posterior brain regions, likely reflecting decreased perceptual processing. Thus, age-related differences in evaluating negatively valenced stimuli might reflect decreased perceptual processing of these stimuli, as well as the engagement of control processes that inhibit the response to negative emotion.

title: Looking at the Sunny Side of Life
abstract: Studies of the negativity bias have demonstrated that negative information has a stronger influence than positive information in a wide range of cognitive domains. At odds with this literature is extensive work now documenting emotional and motivational shifts that result in a positivity effect in older adults. It remains unclear, however, whether this age-related positivity effect results from increases in processing of positive information or from decreases in processing of negative information. Also unknown is the specific time course of development from a negative bias to an apparently positive one. The present study was designed to investigate the negativity bias across the life span using an event-related potential measure of responding to emotionally valenced images. The results suggest that neural reactivity to negative images declines linearly with age, but responding to positive images is surprisingly age invariant across most of the adult life span.

title: Amygdala Responses to Emotionally Valenced Stimuli in Older and Younger Adults
abstract: As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.

title: The Mellow Years?: Neural Basis of Improving Emotional Stability over Age
abstract: Contrary to the pervasive negative stereotypes of human aging, emotional functions may improve with advancing age. However, the brain mechanisms underlying changes in emotional function over age remain unknown. Here, we demonstrate that emotional stability improves linearly over seven decades (12–79 years) of the human lifespan. We used both functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potential recording to examine the neural basis of this improvement. With these multimodal techniques, we show that better stability is predicted by a shift toward greater medial prefrontal control over negative emotional input associated with increased activity later in the processing sequence (beyond 200 ms after stimulus) and less control over positive input, related to a decrease in early activity (within 150 ms). This shift was independent from gray matter loss, indexed by structural magnetic resonance data. We propose an integrative model in which accumulated life experience and the motivation for meaning over acquisition in older age contribute to plasticity of medial prefrontal systems, achieving a greater selective control over emotional functions.

title: Age-related decline in the ability to decode emotional prosody: Primary or secondary phenomenon?
abstract: Emotion processing deficits can cause catastrophic damage to a person's ability to interact socially. While it is known that older adults have difficulty identifying facial emotions, it is still not clear whether this difficulty extends to identification of the emotion conveyed by prosody. This study investigated whether the ability of older adults to decode emotional prosody falls below that of young adults after controlling for loss of hearing sensitivity and key features of cognitive ageing. Apart from frontal lobe load, only verbal IQ was associated with the age-related reduction in performance displayed by older participants, but a notable deficit existed after controlling for its effects. It is concluded that older adults may indeed have difficulty deducing the emotion conveyed by prosody, and that while this difficulty can be exaggerated by some aspects of cognitive ageing, it is primary in origin.

title: Impaired Comprehension of Affective Prosody in Elderly Subjects Is Not Predicted by Age-Related Hearing Loss or Age-Related Cognitive Decline
abstract: Impairments in the ability of elderly people to comprehend affective prosody have been reported, but little is known about the relationship between affective prosodic comprehension and age-related changes in hearing and cognition. The Aprosodia Battery, which included an assessment of attitudinal comprehension, was used to compare affective-prosodic comprehension in young and elderly subjects and to investigate the relationship of results to selected hearing and neuropsychological measures. As a group, the healthy elderly subjects were impaired relative to young subjects on all tasks assessing comprehension of affective prosody. Variability within the elderly group was not predicted by mild to moderate peripheral hearing loss and was only marginally predicted by traditional cognitive measures. These findings along with those of other researchers suggest that loss of affective-prosodic comprehension in elderly persons is related to a specific aging effect that impairs right hemisphere function.

title: A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music
abstract: Do children use the same properties as adults in determining whether music sounds happy or sad? We addressed this question with a set of 32 excerpts (16 happy and 16 sad) taken from pre-existing music. The tempo (i.e. the number of beats per minute) and the mode (i.e. the specific subset of pitches used to write a given musical excerpt) of these excerpts were modified independently and jointly in order to measure their effects on happy-sad judgments. Adults and children from 3 to 8 years old were required to judge whether the excerpts were happy or sad. The results show that as adults, 6--8-year-old children are affected by mode and tempo manipulations. In contrast, 5-year-olds' responses are only affected by a change of tempo. The youngest children (3--4-year-olds) failed to distinguish the happy from the sad tone of the music above chance. The results indicate that tempo is mastered earlier than mode to infer the emotional tone conveyed by music.

title: Mixed affective responses to music with conflicting cues
abstract: We examined whether listening to music induces simultaneously happy and sad affective responding. The stimuli were instrumental excerpts from musical recordings that included a broad range of genres. The excerpts varied in tempo (fast or slow) and mode (major or minor), such that they had consistent happy (fast/major), consistent sad (slow/minor), or inconsistent (fast/minor or slow/major) affective cues. Listeners rated how each excerpt made them feel using separate scales for happiness and sadness. When tempo and mode cues conflicted, “mixed” happy and sad feelings were evoked. Mixed ratings on control measures (pleasantness and unpleasantness) did not show the same pattern.

title: Neural systems for recognition of emotional prosody: a 3-D lesion study.
abstract: Which brain regions are associated with recognition of emotional prosody? Are these distinct from those for recognition of facial expression? These issues were investigated by mapping the overlaps of co-registered lesions from 66 brain-damaged participants as a function of their performance in rating basic emotions. It was found that recognizing emotions from prosody draws on the right frontoparietal operculum, the bilateral frontal pole, and the left frontal operculum. Recognizing emotions from prosody and facial expressions draws on the right frontoparietal cortex, which may be important in reconstructing aspects of the emotion signaled by the stimulus. Furthermore, there were regions in the left and right temporal lobes that contributed disproportionately to recognition of emotion from faces or prosody, respectively.

title: Emotion recognition from faces and prosody following temporal lobectomy.
abstract: The anteromedial temporal lobe has been found to participate in processing emotion, but there are unresolved discrepancies in the literature. To address this issue, the authors investigated recognition of emotion from faces and from prosody in 26 participants with unilateral temporal lobectomy (15 left, 11 right) and in 50 brain-damaged controls. Participants with right, but not left, temporal lobectomy did significantly worse in recognizing fear from facial expressions. There were no group differences in recognizing emotional prosody. Neither IQ nor basic perceptual function accounted for task performance; however, there was a moderate negative correlation between extent of amygdala damage and overall performance. Consistent with some prior studies, these findings support a role for the right anteromedial temporal lobe (including amygdala) in recognizing emotion from faces but caution in drawing conclusions from small group samples.

title: Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision.
abstract: Music constitutes an ideal means to create a sense of suspense in films. However, there has been minimal investigation into the underlying cerebral organization for perceiving danger created by music. In comparison, the amygdala's role in recognition of fear in non-musical contexts has been well established. The present study sought to fill this gap in exploring how patients with amygdala resection recognize emotional expression in music. To this aim, we tested 16 patients with left (LTR; n = 8) or right (RTR; n = 8) medial temporal resection (including amygdala) for the relief of medically intractable seizures and 16 matched controls in an emotion recognition task involving instrumental music. The musical selections were purposely created to induce fear, peacefulness, happiness and sadness. Participants were asked to rate to what extent each musical passage expressed these four emotions on 10-point scales. In order to check for the presence of a perceptual problem, the same musical selections were presented to the participants in an error detection task. None of the patients was found to perform below controls in the perceptual task. In contrast, both LTR and RTR patients were found to be impaired in the recognition of scary music. Recognition of happy and sad music was normal. These findings suggest that the anteromedial temporal lobe (including the amygdala) plays a role in the recognition of danger in a musical context.

title: Amygdala damage impairs emotion recognition from music
abstract: The role of the amygdala in recognition of danger is well established for visual stimuli such as faces. A similar role in another class of emotionally potent stimuli -- music -- has been recently suggested by the study of epileptic patients with unilateral resection of the anteromedian part of the temporal lobe [Gosselin, N., Peretz, I., Noulhiane, M., Hasboun, D., Beckett, C., & Baulac, M., et al. (2005). Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision. Brain, 128(Pt 3), 628-640]. The goal of the present study was to assess the specific role of the amygdala in the recognition of fear from music. To this aim, we investigated a rare subject, S.M., who has complete bilateral damage relatively restricted to the amygdala and not encompassing other sectors of the temporal lobe. In Experiment 1, S.M. and four matched controls were asked to rate the intensity of fear, peacefulness, happiness, and sadness from computer-generated instrumental music purposely created to express those emotions. Subjects also rated the arousal and valence of each musical stimulus. An error detection task assessed basic auditory perceptual function. S.M. performed normally in this perceptual task, but was selectively impaired in the recognition of scary and sad music. In contrast, her recognition of happy music was normal. Furthermore, S.M. judged the scary music to be less arousing and the peaceful music less relaxing than did the controls. Overall, the pattern of impairment in S.M. is similar to that previously reported in patients with unilateral anteromedial temporal lobe damage. S.M.'s impaired emotional judgments occur in the face of otherwise intact processing of musical features that are emotionally determinant. The use of tempo and mode cues in distinguishing happy from sad music was also spared in S.M. Thus, the amygdala appears to be necessary for emotional processing of music rather than the perceptual processing itself.

title: Insights into the ageing mind: a view from cognitive neuroscience
abstract: As we grow older, we may grow wiser, but we can also experience memory loss and cognitive slowing that can interfere with our daily routines. The cognitive neuroscience of human ageing, which relies largely on neuroimaging techniques, relates these cognitive changes to their neural substrates, including structural and functional changes in the prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe regions and white matter tracts. Much remains unknown about how normal ageing affects the neural basis of cognition, but recent research on individual differences in the trajectory of ageing effects is helping to distinguish normal from pathological origins of age-related cognitive changes.

title: Preservation of limbic and paralimbic structures in aging
abstract: Patterns of gray matter (GM) loss were measured in 223 healthy subjects spanning eight decades. We observed significant clusters of accelerated loss in focal regions of the frontal and parietal cortices, including the dorsolateral frontal cortex, pre‐ and postcentral gyrus, and the inferior and superior parietal lobes. The rate of loss in these clusters was approximately twice that of the global average. By contrast, clusters of significant GM preservation were found in limbic and paralimbic structures, including the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, and the cingulate gyrus. In these clusters, GM loss was attenuated significantly relative to the global rate. The preservation of these structures is consistent with the functional importance of the thalamo‐limbic circuits in sensory integration, arousal, emotion, and memory, and lends credence to the idea that later‐maturing cortical regions are more vulnerable to age‐related morphologic changes. Moreover, the limbic findings act as a frame of reference to explore further the effects of stress and learning on these structures in an evidence‐based manner across age.

title: The relationship between frontal gray matter volume and cognition varies across the healthy adult lifespan.
abstract: Age-associated decline in gray matter brain volume and cognitive function in healthy adults has been reported in the literature. The goal of the current study is to examine the relationship between age-related changes in regional gray matter volumes and cognitive function in a large, cross-sectional sample of healthy adults across the lifespan.



Magnetic resonance imaging and cognitive assessment were conducted on 148 adults aged 21-76 years. Multiple regression analyses examining the effect of age were performed on magnetic resonance image-derived gray matter brain volumes and standardized cognitive summary scores of attention and executive function. Regression was also performed to test the effect of age, gray matter volumes, and their interaction on the prediction of cognitive performance.



Age significantly predicted performance on tests of attention (F [1, 146]=50.97, p <0.01, R2=0.26) and executive function (F [1, 146]=126.19, p <0.01, R2=0.46) and gray matter volumes for frontal subregions (lateral, medial, orbital), hippocampus, amygdala, and putamen (F [2, 145]=45.34-23.96, p <0.01-0.02). Lateral frontal (beta=-1.53, t=-2.16, df=131, p <0.03) and orbital frontal (beta=1.24, t=2.08, df=131, p <0.04) regions significantly predicted performance on tests of attention. Lateral frontal (beta=-1.69, t=-2.83, df=131, p <0.01) and the interaction between age and lateral frontal volume (beta=3.76, t=2.49, df=131, p <0.02) significantly predicted executive function.



The findings confirm age-associated decline in cognitive function and gray matter volumes, particularly in anterior cortical brain regions. Furthermore, the association between lateral frontal gray matter volume and the ability to successfully plan, organize, and execute strategies varies as a function of age across the healthy adult lifespan.

title: A functional MRI study of happy and sad affective states induced by classical music
abstract: The present study investigated the functional neuroanatomy of transient mood changes in response to Western classical music. In a pilot experiment, 53 healthy volunteers (mean age: 32.0; SD = 9.6) evaluated their emotional responses to 60 classical musical pieces using a visual analogue scale (VAS) ranging from 0 (sad) through 50 (neutral) to 100 (happy). Twenty pieces were found to accurately induce the intended emotional states with good reliability, consisting of 5 happy, 5 sad, and 10 emotionally unevocative, neutral musical pieces. In a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal contrast was measured in response to the mood state induced by each musical stimulus in a separate group of 16 healthy participants (mean age: 29.5; SD = 5.5). Mood state ratings during scanning were made by a VAS, which confirmed the emotional valence of the selected stimuli. Increased BOLD signal contrast during presentation of happy music was found in the ventral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus, and auditory association areas. With sad music, increased BOLD signal responses were noted in the hippocampus/amygdala and auditory association areas. Presentation of neutral music was associated with increased BOLD signal responses in the insula and auditory association areas. Our findings suggest that an emotion processing network in response to music integrates the ventral and dorsal striatum, areas involved in reward experience and movement; the anterior cingulate, which is important for targeting attention; and medial temporal areas, traditionally found in the appraisal and processing of emotions.

title: Processing emotional tone from speech in Parkinson’s disease: A role for the basal ganglia
abstract: In this study, individuals with Parkinson’s disease were tested as a model for basal ganglia dysfunction to infer how these structures contribute to the processing of emotional speech tone (emotional prosody). Nondemented individuals with and without Parkinson’s disease (n = 21/group) completed neuropsychological tests and tasks that required them to process the meaning of emotional prosody in various ways (discrimination, identification, emotional feature rating). Individuals with basal ganglia disease exhibited abnormally reduced sensitivity to the emotional significance of prosody in a range of contexts, a deficit that could not be attributed to changes in mood, emotional-symbolic processing, or estimated frontal lobe cognitive resource limitations in most conditions. On the basis of these and broader findings in the literature, it is argued that the basal ganglia provide a critical mechanism for reinforcing the behavioral significance of prosodic patterns and other temporal representations derived from cue sequences (Lieberman, 2000), facilitating cortical elaboration of these events.

title: Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotion: A Meta-Analysis of Emotion Activation Studies in PET and fMRI
abstract: Neuroimagingstudies with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have begun to describe the functional neuroanatomy of emotion. Taken separately, specific studies vary in task dimensions and in type(s) of emotion studied and are limited by statistical power and sensitivity. By examining findings across studies, we sought to determine if common or segregated patterns of activations exist across various emotional tasks. We reviewed 55 PET and fMRI activation studies (yielding 761 individual peaks) which investigated emotion in healthy subjects. Peak activation coordinates were transformed into a standard space and plotted onto canonical 3-D brain renderings. We divided the brain into 20 nonoverlapping regions, and characterized each region by its responsiveness across individual emotions (positive, negative, happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust), to different induction methods (visual, auditory, recall/imagery), and in emotional tasks with and without cognitive demand. Our review yielded the following summary observations: (1) The medial prefrontal cortex had a general role in emotional processing; (2) fear specifically engaged the amygdala; (3) sadness was associated with activity in the subcallosal cingulate; (4) emotional induction by visual stimuli activated the occipital cortex and the amygdala; (5) induction by emotional recall/imagery recruited the anterior cingulate and insula; (6) emotional tasks with cognitive demand also involved the anterior cingulate and insula. This review provides a critical comparison of findings across individual studies and suggests that separate brain regions are involved in different aspects of emotion.

title: Music Lessons Enhance IQ
abstract: The idea that music makes you smarter has received considerable attention from scholars and the media. The present report is the first to test this hypothesis directly with random assignment of a large sample of children (N = 144) to two different types of music lessons (keyboard or voice) or to control groups that received drama lessons or no lessons. IQ was measured before and after the lessons. Compared with children in the control groups, children in the music groups exhibited greater increases in full-scale IQ. The effect was relatively small, but it generalized across IQ subtests, index scores, and a standardized measure of academic achievement. Unexpectedly, children in the drama group exhibited substantial pre- to post-test improvements in adaptive social behavior that were not evident in the music groups.

title: On measuring performance in category judgment studies of nonverbal behavior
abstract: Attention is drawn to three interrelated types of error that are committed with high frequencies in the description and analysis of studies of nonverbal behavior. The errors involve the calculation of inappropriate measures of accuracy, the use in statistical analyses of inappropriate chance levels, and misapplications ofX2 and binomial statistical tests. Almost all papers published between 1979 and 1991 that reported performance separately for different stimulus and response classes suffer from one or more of these errors. The potential consequences of these errors are described, and a variety of proposed measures of performance is examined. Since all measures formerly proposed have weaknesses, a new and easily calculated measure, an unbiased hit rate (Hu), is proposed. This measure is the joint probability that a stimulus category is correctly identified given that it is presented at all and that a response is correctly used given that it is used at all. Two available data sets are reanalyzed using this measure, and the differences in the conclusions reached compared to those reached with an analysis of hit rates are described.