  Music is frequently used to establish atmosphere and to enhance/alter emotion
in dramas and films. During music listening, visual imagery is a common
mechanism underlying emotion induction. The present functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) study examined the neural substrates of the emotional
processing of music and imagined scene. A factorial design was used with
factors emotion valence (positive; negative) and music (withoutMUSIC:
script-driven imagery of emotional scenes; withMUSIC: script-driven imagery of
emotional scenes and simultaneously listening to affectively congruent music).
The baseline condition was imagery of neutral scenes in the absence of music.
Eleven females and five males participated in this fMRI study. The contrasts of
positive and negative withoutMUSIC conditions minus the baseline (imagery of
neutral scenes) showed no significant activation. When comparing the withMUSIC
to withoutMUSIC conditions, activity in a number of emotion-related regions was
observed, including the temporal pole (TP), amygdala, hippocampus,
hypothalamus, anterior ventral tegmental area (VTA), locus coeruleus, and
anterior cerebellum. We hypothesized that the TP may integrate music and the
imagined scene to extract socioemotional significance, initiating the
subcortical structures to generate subjective feelings and bodily responses.
For the withMUSIC conditions, negative emotions were associated with enhanced
activation in the posterior VTA compared to positive emotions. Our findings
replicated and extended previous research which suggests that different
subregions of the VTA are sensitive to rewarding and aversive stimuli. Taken
together, this study suggests that emotional music embedded in an imagined
scenario is a salient social signal that prompts preparation of
approach/avoidance behaviours and emotional responses in listeners.
