Bi-Annual Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion July 8-10, 2015

Musical emotions in amusia: dissociation between emotion recognition and intensity judgments

Yohana Leveque, Barbara Tillmann, Anne Caclin

Lyon Neursoscience Research Center - CNRS - INSERM - Lyon I University

Two survey studies have suggested that musical emotions may be reduced in congenital amusia (MacDonald & Stewart 2008, Omigie et al. 2012), a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by an impairment of music processing. However, preliminary studies failed to show differences in emotional responses or emotion recognition in amusic individuals compared to controls (pos- ters of Gosselin et al. and Paquette et al. at Neuroscience & Music 2011). In acquired amusia cases, musical anhedonia is sometimes reported along with perceptual impairments. We pres- ent here three experiments investigating musical emotions in congenital and acquired amusia, using faces as control stimuli. The same task was used in all experiments: Participants were asked to indicate the emotion that was evoked by real musical recordings (joy, sadness, fear or serenity) and faces (joy, sadness, fear or neutral) and to rate the intensity of this emotion on a subjective scale. The first experiment involved 13 congenital amusic and 13 control participants. For the face ma- terial, both groups showed similar response patterns for both recognition and intensity ratings. For the musical material, amusics and controls rated the intensity of the emotion in a similar way, but the amusic participants were significantly impaired in emotion recognition in compari- son to the controls. These results suggest that amusics’ impairments in pitch and timbre proces- sing and memory, linked to fronto-temporal anomalies, have an impact on emotion recognition but not on subjective emotion quantification. Experiment 2 investigated a single case with a right temporal lesion, who showed an acquired amusia of music perception. The patient showed an opposite result pattern in the musical emo- tion task (intact processing for faces), notably with a preserved ability to recognize emotions, but significantly reduced intensity ratings, revealing a musical anhedonia. In Experiment 3, three cases of patients with Landau-Kleffner Syndrome were investigated in comparison with a matched control group. The patients’ performance revealed impairments in both perceptual and emotion recognition tasks, correlated to the syndrome severity. Inte- restingly, music enjoyment was preserved, even in the case with the severest amusia including emotion recognition deficits. These result patterns demonstrate that emotion recognition and emotional intensity evalua- tion can be selectively altered in congenital and acquired amusia. They more generally provide new insights on potential interactions between emotional, perceptual and evaluative processes during music listening in the normally functioning and the injured brain. www.isre2015.org www.affective-sciences.org