On joy and sorrow: Neuroimaging meta-analyses of music-induced emotion.
Level 1 - systematic review of randomized trials
Coordinate-based meta-analysis (ALE) of neuroimaging studies; level assigned by design analogy.
PubMed 40800865 · doi:10.1162/imag_a_00425
What was done
Authors conducted coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging studies investigating music-evoked emotions. They evaluated spatial convergence across 40 studies for overall emotional music listening, 15 studies for unpleasant music, 17 studies for pleasant music, and 8 studies contrasting emotional with neutral music, specifically examining the differential effects of affective valence versus arousal.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical test statistics, coordinates, or cluster sizes. Across the pooled literature, emotional music activated cortical and subcortical regions including the amygdala, insula, striatum, thalamus, hippocampus, anterior cingulate gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Activation segregated by emotional dimensions: anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), dorsal striatum, and thalamus engagement depended on arousal effects, whereas amygdala activation depended on hedonic valence.
Why it matters
This work dissociates the neural processing of music-induced arousal from hedonic valence, demonstrating that frontostriatal-thalamic circuits scale with emotional intensity while the amygdala tracks pleasant versus unpleasant quality. This mapping provides targets for mechanistic research into auditory affective processing and emotion regulation.
Limits
The abstract does not report participant sample sizes, age or clinical characteristics, musical stimulus paradigms, or exact statistical effect sizes. Coordinate-based meta-analyses inherently rely on reported peak activations rather than raw image data and may be subject to heterogeneous emotion-induction tasks and publication bias.
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