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Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cultures, mostly due to its power to evoke and regulate emotions. However, effects of music evoking different emotional experiences such as sadness and happiness on cognition, and in particular on self-generated thought, are unknown. Here we use probe-caught thought sampling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the influence of sad and happy music on mind-wandering and its underlying neuronal mechanisms. In three experiments we found that sad music, compared with happy music, is associated with stronger mind-wandering (Experiments 1A and 1B) and greater centrality of the nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN) (Experiment 2). Thus, our results demonstrate that, when listening to sad vs . happy music, people withdraw their attention inwards and engage in spontaneous, self-referential cognitive processes. Importantly, our results also underscore that DMN activity can be modulated as a function of sad and happy music. These findings call for a systematic investigation of the relation between music and thought, having broad implications for the use of music in education and clinical settings.

This study investigated the role of autonomic nervous system (ANS) coordination in response to emotion in girls’ and boys’ development of relational (e.g., ignoring, excluding) and physical (e.g., hitting, kicking) aggression. Caregivers reported on children’s relational and physical aggression at ages 6, 7, 8, and 10 years ( N = 232, 50.4% girls, 46.6% Latinx). Sympathetic nervous system (assessed via pre-ejection period) and parasympathetic nervous system (assessed via respiratory sinus arrhythmia) reactivity were measured in response to video clips depicting fear, happiness, and sadness at age 7. Growth curve models indicated that ANS reactivity to sadness, but not to fear or happiness, was related to trajectories of relational aggression. In contrast, ANS reactivity to all three emotions was associated with trajectories of physical aggression. Effects differed across genders, indicating that distinct patterns of ANS reactivity to emotion may be involved in girls’ and boys’ development of aggression. Overall, these findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the role of ANS reactivity to emotion in aggressive behavior. Moreover, this study considers ANS reactivity to specific emotions, as related to both relational and physical aggression, and as differentially expressed among girls versus boys.

Research on basic emotions has expanded beyond the traditional six categories, identifying over 20 distinct emotional states. However, differentiating some emotions remained challenging due to partially overlapping facial expressions. Grief and sadness are two such emotions that are difficult to distinguish. This study investigated the behavioral and neural mechanisms of grief perception in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), comparing it with sadness . Participants categorized and rated emotional facial images in grief and sadness conditions on valence, arousal, and dominance scales. While participants perceiving emotional facial images prefrontal cortex (PFC) hemodynamic activities were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Explicit behavioral responses showed no significant differences, however implicit measures (reaction times) revealed distinctions between grief and sadness perception. Further fNIRS results indicated increased oxy-Hb in the right dorsolateral PFC for grief condition images compared to sadness condition images. Additionally, cultural differences were observed, with Asian participants showing higher oxy-Hb responses in the dorsal PFC for unpleasant facial stimuli in grief conditions. These findings support cultural variability in emotion perception and regulation. The combination of behavioral reaction time and neuroimaging data suggests distinct implicit perceptual and neural processing mechanisms for grief and sadness . This indicates separate automatic implicit mechanisms for these emotions.

Previous studies have indicated that a sad mood and sleep deprivation increase mind wandering, but it is unclear whether these associations reflect reduced effort in concentrating on the task at hand or diminished cognitive control. In an internet-based experiment, participants completed a sleep disturbance questionnaire followed by a complex span task and a 2-back task with thought-sampling probes. Subsequently, participants underwent a positive, neutral, or negative mood induction prior to repeating the 2-back. The results ( N  = 504) replicated the finding of increased task-unrelated thoughts following sad mood induction, B  = 0.56 ( SE  = 0.14), p  < 0.01, d  = 0.31. Unguided thoughts were increased following sad mood induction, B  = 0.31 (0.13), p  = 0.02, but working memory did not significantly moderate this association ( p  = 0.31). People reported a lower degree of trying to concentrate on the 2-back after the sad mood induction, B  = −0.07 (0.04), p  = 0.04, but actual performance was not affected ( p  = 0.46). Sleep disturbances showed small associations with task-unrelated, B  = 0.23 (0.08), p  < 0.01, and unguided thoughts, B  = 0.32 (0.08), p  < 0.01. This study strengthens the evidence that a sad mood and poor sleep relate to mind wandering.

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease broadly characterized by socioemotional impairments, includes three clinical subtypes: behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Emerging evidence has shown emotional reactivity impairments in bvFTD and svPPA, whereas emotional reactivity in nfvPPA is far less studied. In 105 patients with FTD (49 bvFTD, 31 svPPA and 25 nfvPPA) and 27 healthy controls, we examined three aspects of emotional reactivity (physiology, facial behavior and subjective experience) in response to a sad film. In a subset of the sample, we also examined the neural correlates of diminished aspects of reactivity using voxel-based morphometry. Results indicated that all three subtypes of FTD showed diminished physiological responding in respiration rate and diastolic blood pressure; patients with bvFTD and svPPA also showed diminished subjective experience, and no subtypes showed diminished facial behavior. Moreover, there were differences among the clinical subtypes in brain regions where smaller volumes were associated with diminished sadness reactivity. These results show that emotion impairments extend to sadness reactivity in FTD and underscore the importance of considering different aspects of sadness reactivity in multiple clinical subtypes for characterizing emotional deficits and associated neurodegeneration in FTD.

The present study used cross-lagged panel analyses to test longitudinal associations among emotion regulation, prefrontal cortex (PFC) function, and depression severity in adolescent girls. The ventromedial and dorsomedial PFC (vmPFC and dmPFC) were regions of interest given their roles in depression pathophysiology, self-referential processing, and emotion regulation. At ages 16 and 17, seventy-eight girls completed a neuroimaging scan to assess changes in vmPFC and dmPFC activation to sad faces, and measures of depressive symptom severity and emotion regulation. The 1-year cross-lagged effects of dmPFC activity at age 16 on expressive suppression at age 17 and depressive symptomatology at age 17 were significant, demonstrating a predictive relation between dmPFC activity and both suppression and depressive severity.

The immediate detection and correct processing of affective facial expressions are one of the most important competences in social interaction and thus a main subject in emotion and affect research. Generally, studies in these research domains, use pictures of adults who display affective facial expressions as experimental stimuli. However, for studies investigating developmental psychology and attachment behaviour it is necessary to use age-matched stimuli, where it is children that display affective expressions. PSYCAFE represents a newly developed picture-set of children’s faces. It includes reference portraits of girls and boys aged 4 to 6 years averaged digitally from different individual pictures, that were categorized to six basic affects (fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger and surprise) plus a neutral facial expression by cluster analysis. This procedure led to deindividualized and affect prototypical portraits. Individual affect expressive portraits of adults from an already validated picture-set (KDEF) were used in a similar way to create affect prototypical images also of adults. The stimulus set has been validated on human observers and entail emotion recognition accuracy rates and scores for intensity, authenticity and likeability ratings of the specific affect displayed. Moreover, the stimuli have also been characterized by the iMotions Facial Expression Analysis Module, providing additional data on probability values representing the likelihood that the stimuli depict the expected affect. Finally, the validation data from human observers and iMotions are compared to data on facial mimicry of healthy adults in response to these portraits, measured by facial EMG (m. zygomaticus major and m. corrugator supercilii).

Objective: Emotion recognition is an important aspect of emotion processing, which is needed for appropriate social behavior and normal socialization. Previous studies in adults with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, in those convicted of criminal behavior, or in children with conduct disorder show impairments in negative emotion recognition. The present study investigated affective facial and prosody recognition in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. Methods: Participants were 8- to 12-year-old children at high risk of developing criminal behavior (N=219, 83.1% boys) and typically developing controls (N=43, 72.1% boys). The high-risk children were recruited through an ongoing early intervention project of the city of Amsterdam, that focuses on the underage siblings or children of delinquents, and those failing to attend school. Facial and vocal recognition of happy, sad, angry, and fear was measured with the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) test and the prosody test of the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks (ANT), respectively. Results: The high-risk group was significantly worse in facial affect recognition and had particular problems with fear and sadness recognition. No hostile attribution bias was found. The high-risk group did not differ from controls in affective prosody recognition but needed significantly more time to recognize emotions. Conclusions: The emotion-specific deficits found in forensic and clinical populations are already present in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. These findings help us understand a possible underlying mechanism of antisocial behavior that could provide directions for tailored interventions. (JINS, 2019, 25, 57–64)

Background Sadness can be a harbinger of serious medical conditions and a primary manifestation of depressive symptoms. Music is a promising modality for regulating sadness, although its effect on participants, whether with or without long-term depressive symptoms, remains unknown. In this study, the effect of music on sadness regulation was investigated using psychological and physiological indicators between depressed and non-depressed individuals. Methods Data were collected from 149 participants (18 to 29 years old). The participants were divided into two groups (depressed and non-depressed groups) based on their depressive symptoms, experienced sadness induction, and music intervention. Electrocardiogram signals were collected to measure heart rate variability (HRV). Results (1) Music alleviated sadness (increasing positive emotions, valence and dominance, while decreasing arousal); (2) sadness increased the duration between consecutive heartbeats, and music decreased this duration; (3) participants with depressive symptoms showed lower HRV than those without, and music enhanced HRV for the depressed group; (4) no significant difference in the effects of music was found between the two groups; and (5) the regulatory impact of music on sadness was not influenced by prior music listening habits. Conclusions The findings indicate that listening to music can be beneficial for both healthy and subclinical individuals when managing sadness. The findings underscore the importance of recognizing the role of music in promoting emotional well-being. Trial registration This trial was retrospectively registered on ClinicalTrials.gov PRS (Protocol Registration and Results System) (number NCT06516666) on July 22, 2024 ( https://register.clinicaltrials.gov/ ).

Although many studies revealed that emotions and their dynamics have a profound impact on cognition and behavior, it has proven difficult to unobtrusively measure emotions. In the current study, our objective was to distinguish different experiences elicited by audiovisual stimuli designed to evoke particularly happy, sad, fear and disgust emotions, using electroencephalography (EEG) and a multivariate approach. We show that we were able to classify these emotional experiences well above chance level. Importantly, we retained all the information (frequency and topography) present in the data. This allowed us to interpret the differences between emotional experiences in terms of component psychological processes such as attention and arousal that are known to be associated with the observed activation patterns. In addition, we illustrate how this method of classifying emotional experiences can be applied on a moment-by-moment basis in order to track dynamic changes in the emotional response over time. The application of our approach may be of value in many contexts in which the experience of a given stimulus or situation changes over time, ranging from clinical to consumption settings.