MUSIC AND EMOTION - PERCEPTUAL DETERMINANTS, IMMEDIACY, AND ISOLATIONAFTER BRAIN-DAMAGE

This study grew out of the observation of a remarkable sparing of emot ional responses to music in the context of severe deficits in music pr ocessing after brain damage in a nonmusician. Six experiments were des igned to explore the perceptual basis of emotional judgments in music. In each experiment, the same set of 32 excerpts taken from the classi cal repertoire and intended to convey a happy or sad tone were present ed under various transformations and with different task demands. In E xpts. 1 to 3, subjects were required to judge on a 10-point scale whet her the excerpts were happy or sad. Altogether the results show that e motional judgments are (a) highly consistent across subjects and resis tant to brain damage; (b) determined by musical structure (mode and te mpo); and (c) immediate. Experiments 4 to 6 were designed to assess wh ether emotional and non-emotional judgments reflect the operations of a single perceptual analysis system. To this aim, we searched for evid ence of dissociation in our brain-damaged patient, I.R., by using task s that do not require emotional interpretation. These non-emotional ta sks were a 'same-different' classification task (Expt. 4), error detec tion tasks (Expt, 5A,B) and a change monitoring task (Expt, 6), I.R. w as impaired in these non-emotional tasks except when the change affect ed the mode and the tempo of the excerpt, in which case I.R. performed close to normal. The results are discussed in relation to the possibi lity that emotional and non-emotional judgments are the products of di stinct pathways. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.