title: Basic, specific, mechanistic? Conceptualizing musical emotions in the brain.
abstract: The number of studies investigating music processing in the human brain continues to increase, with a large proportion of them focussing on the correlates of so-called musical emotions. The current Review highlights the recent development whereby such studies are no longer concerned only with basic emotions such as happiness and sadness but also with so-called music-specific or "aesthetic" ones such as nostalgia and wonder. It also highlights how mechanisms such as expectancy and empathy, which are seen as inducing musical emotions, are enjoying ever-increasing investigation and substantiation with physiological and neuroimaging methods. It is proposed that a combination of these approaches, namely, investigation of the precise mechanisms through which so-called music-specific or aesthetic emotions may arise, will provide the most important advances for our understanding of the unique nature of musical experience.
authors.affiliation: Music Department, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 60322, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
authors.forename: Diana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Omigie
mesh_terms: D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: aesthetics; basic theory of emotions; music; neuroimaging; specific emotions; utilitarian emotions