Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener.

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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener.

Michael J. Frank Elvira Brattico Elvira Brattico Elvira Brattico Brigitte Bogert Brigitte Bogert Benjamin P. Gold Benjamin P. Gold

subject

Pleasure Dopamine Affective neuroscience EVERYDAY LIFE 0302 clinical medicine PARKINSONS-DISEASE Reinforcement learning DOPAMINE RELEASE subjectivity Reinforcement learning Psychology BRAIN-REGIONS Original Research Article General Psychology reward media_common CORRELATE Music psychology 05 social sciences humanities dopamine Psychology psychological phenomena and processes Cognitive psychology PREDICT INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES reinforcement learning Music therapy media_common.quotation_subject lcsh:BF1-990 pleasure behavioral disciplines and activities 050105 experimental psychology MECHANISMS Pleasure 03 medical and health sciences Reward system Reward EMOTION 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Active listening music musical experience Listening strategy Subjectivity lcsh:Psychology Music and emotion human activities Music 030217 neurology & neurosurgery RESPONSES Musical experience listening strategy

description

Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while those with lesser dopamine efficacy learn better to avoid punishments. In this study, we explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Subjects from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose a pleasurable and a neutral piece of music from an experimenter-compiled database, and then listened to one or both of these pieces (according to pseudo-random group assignment) as they performed a reinforcement learning task dependent on dopamine transmission. We assessed musical backgrounds as well as typical listening patterns with the new Helsinki Inventory of Music and Affective Behaviors (HIMAB), and separately investigated behavior for the training and test phases of the learning task. Subjects with more musical experience trained better with neutral music and tested better with pleasurable music, while those with less musical experience exhibited the opposite effect. HIMABresults regarding listening behaviors and subjective music ratings indicate that these effects arose from different listening styles: namely, more affective listening in non-musicians and more analytical listening in musicians. In conclusion, musical pleasure was able to influence task performance, and the shape of this effectdepended on group and individual factors. These findings have implications in affective neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, learning, and music therapy. Peer reviewed

year	journal	country	edition	language
2013-08-21	Frontiers in psychology

10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00541 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23970875