Neural Representations of Embodied Musical Emotions

Bodily sensations shape the emotional experience of music, yet the neural underpinnings of embodied musical emotions remain poorly understood. Here we investigated the correspondence between neural activity patterns and self-reported bodily sensations induced by emotional music. Participants (n=74) listened to emotionally engaging (aggressive, happy, sad, scary) music while their hemodynamic brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Music-induced bodily sensations were measured after imaging. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) was used to identify brain regions where the representational geometries of neural responses to music align with the topographical patterns of the corresponding bodily sensations, emotions, and musical features. Bodily sensations maps (BSMs) showed emotion-specific topographies. Univariate general linear model (GLM) analysis revealed increased neural activity within motor, somatosensory, interoceptive, limbic, and auditory brain regions during music listening, with little difference between the emotion categories. In contrast, RSA revealed significant correspondence between the representational geometries of neural activity patterns and emotion category-specific bodily sensations in motor, somatosensory, emotion-related and auditory brain regions. Multivariate pattern (MVP) classification analysis showed that activity in the auditory cortex accurately predicted the emotion categories. Our results indicate neural correspondence to bodily sensations in somatomotor and somatosensory brain regions, providing novel evidence for the neural basis of embodied music-induced emotions.