Pleasure and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract Most people report that music reliably generates emotions. Emotional arousal can be traced to the interaction between mechanisms involved in perception, memory, and other cognitive functions with the striatum, amygdala, and other limbic structures. Several factors are associated with portraying and conveying emotion, including social aspects, movement cues, vocal features, roughness or dissonance, and memory. Preference for specific musical pieces or styles is strongly influenced by emotional arousal experienced during adolescence, which is linked to a dopaminergic surge in the striatum during that time of life. Music can be used for emotional self-regulation via psychological mechanisms, such as reappraisal, which seem to involve top-down modulation from frontal cortex onto striatum and amygdala.