Poster No:
2499
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
Elise Desbarats1, Mathieu Roy1, Taryn Berman1
Institutions:
1McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
First Author:
Co-Author(s):
Introduction:
Preferred music, particularly music that elicits the pleasurable musical chills response, has been shown to be the most effective type of music for pain relief (Garza-Villarreal et al., 2017; Valevicius et al., 2023). However, we lack an understanding of the specific mechanisms underlying this effect. Given that positive emotions elicited by music are influenced by the mesolimbic reward system (Mas-Herrero et al., 2021), activity in this system can serve as a potential mediator for the impact of music on pain. Specifically, activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), predicts how enjoyable we find music to be, as well as the occurrence of musical chills (Salimpoor et al., 2011). Significantly, the NAcc is also an essential component of pain processing, appearing in a neurosignature that tracks subjective responses to pain (Woo et al., 2017). We present preliminary neuroimaging and behavioral results from a study aiming to investigate the role of musical pleasure and NAcc activity elicited by self-selected preferred music in determining musically-induced hypoalgesia.
Methods:
12 participants (%F = 92 , M = 19) provided four pieces of music they find extremely pleasurable to listen to. First, participants listened to their self-selected music and control versions of those songs while giving continuous pleasure ratings. Auditory controls consisted of silence conditions and scrambled music, created by splitting the excerpts into two-second segments and randomizing their order. This method controls for the acoustic features of musical stimuli (eg. tonality, timbre) while disrupting musical structures that can contribute to enjoyment of the music. Participants then underwent a sensory calibration procedure to assess their pain tolerance. They then performed a music-listening task in an MRI scanner where they listened to 20 excerpts, each lasting 180s. Pleasurable music and control stimuli were presented once with four 8-second thermal pain stimulations and once without. Participants rated the pain of these stimulations and their enjoyment of each excerpt on scales of 0-100. High resolution T1-weighted structural images and whole-brain fMRI data (TR = 867ms, TE = 27.2 ms) were gathered on a 3T Siemens Prisma scanner. We assessed descriptive statistics of pain and enjoyment ratings and compared neural activation during pain stimulations in each condition.
Results:
Preliminary behavioral data (n = 12) demonstrates that participants enjoyed listening to their favorite songs in the MRI scanner (M = 81.53, SD = 12.58), and that enjoyment ratings decreased significantly by an average of 43 points between scrambled and music conditions (t(190)= -17.60, p < .01, d = -2.54). Concurrent with previous studies, pain stimulations in the music condition (M = 50.73, SD = 13.65) were rated on average as 2.81 points less painful than pain stimulations paired with scrambled music (M = 53.54, SD = 16.59), and 4.23 points less painful than stimulations paired with silence (M = 54.96, SD = 17.06). Preliminary neuroimaging data (n = 8) showed that activation was higher in the left nucleus accumbens during pain stimulations in music conditions than during stimulations delivered in silence (t = 5.00, p <.001(unc.), x = -3.84, y = 13.68, z = -6.00). We also observed greater activity in the right nucleus accumbens (t = 6.47, p <.001(unc.), x = 11.03, y = 7.73, z = -18.00) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (t = 4.95, p <.001(unc.), x = 2.11, y = 25.57, z = 60.00) during pain stimulations in music conditions compared to stimulations in scrambled conditions.
Conclusions:
These initial results follow existing literature describing hypoalgesia in response to preferred music. Results generated from this study may provide pre-clinical evidence to support the full integration of musical interventions in the treatment of pain conditions and in contexts involving acute pain such as dental procedures and vaccinations.
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Music 2
Modeling and Analysis Methods:
Activation (eg. BOLD task-fMRI)
Perception, Attention and Motor Behavior:
Perception: Pain and Visceral 1
Keywords:
FUNCTIONAL MRI
Pain
Perception
Other - Music
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Garza-Villarreal, E. A. (2017). Music-Induced Analgesia in Chronic Pain Conditions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Pain Physician, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 597–610.
Mas-Herrero, E. (2021). Unraveling the Temporal Dynamics of Reward Signals in Music-Induced Pleasure with TMS. Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 41, no. 17, pp. 3889–3899.
Salimpoor, V. N. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 257–262.
Valevicius, D. (2023). Emotional responses to favorite and relaxing music predict music-induced hypoalgesia. Frontiers in Pain Research, vol. 4.
Woo, C.-W. (2017). Quantifying cerebral contributions to pain beyond nociception. Nature Communications, vol. 8, no. 4211.