Insula

Music psychology

Musicology

Psychology

Neuroscience

Cognition

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive neuroscience of music

Pedagogy

Orbitofrontal cortex

Cortex (anatomy)

Anterior cingulate cortex

Secondary somatosensory cortex

Amygdala

Anger

Sadness

Auditory cortex

Surprise

Prefrontal cortex

Functional neuroimaging

Neuroimaging

Social psychology

NeuroImage

Since the publication of the first neuroscience study investigating emotion with music about two decades ago, the number of functional neuroimaging studies published on this topic has increased each year. This research interest is in part due to the ubiquity of music across cultures, and to music's power to evoke a diverse range of intensely felt emotions. To support a better understanding of the brain correlates of music-evoked emotions this article reports a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies (n = 47 studies with n = 944 subjects). The studies employed a range of diverse experimental approaches (e.g., using music to evoke joy, sadness, fear, tension, frissons, surprise, unpleasantness, or feelings of beauty). The results of an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) indicate large clusters in a range of structures, including amygdala, anterior hippocampus, auditory cortex, and numerous structures of the reward network (ventral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex). The results underline the rewarding nature of music, the role of the auditory cortex as an emotional hub, and the role of the hippocampus in attachment-related emotions and social bonding.

A coordinate-based meta-analysis of music-evoked emotions