Music College, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Brain Cogn. 2019 Oct;135:103577. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2019.06.001. Epub 2019 Jun 12.
This study investigated whether individuals with congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch perception, were able to process musical emotions in single chords either automatically or consciously. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a cross-modal affective priming paradigm to elicit automatic emotional processing through ERPs, in which target facial expressions were preceded by either affectively congruent or incongruent chords with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 200 msec. Results revealed automatic emotional processing of major/minor triads (Experiment 1) and consonant/dissonant chords (Experiment 2) in controls, who showed longer reaction times and increased N400 for incongruent than congruent trials, while amusics failed to exhibit such a priming effect at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels. In Experiment 3, we further examined conscious emotional evaluation of the same chords in amusia. Results showed that amusics were unable to consciously differentiate the emotions conveyed by major and minor chords and by consonant and dissonant chords, as compared with controls. These findings suggest the impairment in automatic and conscious emotional processing of music in amusia. The implications of these findings in relation to musical emotional processing are discussed.
本研究旨在探讨先天性失歌症患者（一种遗传性音乐音高感知障碍）是否能够自动或有意识地处理单一和弦的音乐情感。在实验 1 和实验 2 中，我们使用跨模态情感启动范式通过 ERP 来引发自动的情感处理，其中目标面部表情之前是有 200 毫秒刺激起始时距（SOA）的情感一致或不一致的和弦。结果表明，在控制组中，大三和弦/小三和弦（实验 1）和协和和弦/不协和和弦（实验 2）会产生自动的情感处理，他们对不一致的试验表现出比一致的试验更长的反应时间和增加的 N400，而失歌症患者在行为和电生理水平上均未能表现出这种启动效应。在实验 3 中，我们进一步研究了失歌症患者对相同和弦的有意识的情感评估。结果表明，与对照组相比，失歌症患者无法有意识地区分大三和弦/小三和弦以及协和和弦/不协和和弦所传达的情感。这些发现表明，失歌症患者在音乐的自动和有意识的情感处理方面存在障碍。讨论了这些发现与音乐情感处理的关系。
