Summary: A new research finds that the urge to move to music—known as groove—is a specific physiological response, split from musical entertainment. Researchers examined people who have music depression, or who experience little to no delight from music, and found that they still had a strong urge to move when listening to rhythmic beat.
Individuals rated how much activity they had and how much the music made them feel, indicating that those with anhedonia perhaps find pleasure in movement itself. Unlike previous objectives, these people showed regular hole actions, suggesting that rhythm-based action engages brain circuits different from those responsible for musical enjoyment.
Major Information
- Movement-Driven Enjoyment: People with music anhedonia also experience an urge to move to songs, even if they don’t like it.
- Separate Brain Circuits: The lateral brain, linked to action, may drive hole responses, while the dorsal striatum regulates artistic pleasure.
- Potential Brain Studies: Researchers intend to examine how brain connectivity differs between those with artistic anhedonia and using MRI and magnetoencephalography.
Origin: Concordia University
According to a new study led by Concordia researchers, the joyful urge to move to songs — to groove — appears to be a biological response impartial of how much we normally enjoy music.
People with music depression, or those who take little or no satisfaction from music, are so susceptible to that kind of response.
The study’s lead creator is , Isaac Romkey, a PhD student in the , Department of Psychology. He writes in the journal , PLOS One , that current research shows the two aspects of groove, pleasure and urge to move, while frequently closely connected, may in fact become distinct.
To test this, Romkey and his co-authors compared groove responses to more than 50 short pieces of music in subjects with musical anhedonia and non-anhedonic controls. Participants who had musical anhedonia were only allowed to participate if they derived pleasure from other life facets, such as food and sex, and if they exhibited appropriate reward responses across other criteria.
The researchers made sure that participants had intact pitch and beat perception and were not depressed. Participants listened to short pieces of music that varied in rhythmic complexity and were designed to elicit a groove response. After each piece, they were asked to rate how much of the experience made them want to move and how much it piqued their interest.
” Typically, we would anticipate a U-shaped response to rhythmic complexity, which means that we want to move to music with medium-complex rhythms rather than music that is very simple or very complex,” Romkey says.
The authors hypothesized that those with anhedonia would have lower pleasure ratings but retained an urge to move music’s groovy music ratings based on this.
However, they found no differences between controls and anhedonics in terms of pleasure or urge to move. More importantly, they showed that for people with anhedonia, the urge to move appears to drive their experience of pleasure. That suggests that the urge to move makes up for the blunted pleasure experience experienced by those who have musical anhedonia.
We anticipated a flattening of that U-shaped curve in the musical anhedonia group, but that is not what we saw. That implies that those who have musical anhedonia get pleasure from the urge to move. More generally, it suggests that the urge to move may itself generate pleasure”.
Same response, different sources
The causes of musical anhedonia remain understudied, but Romkey says it appears to be heritable. He does note that the urge to move has been linked to the dorsal striatum, a part of the brain that is linked to motor functions, while pleasure is more associated with the ventral striatum, which regulates reward, motivation and goal-directed behaviour.
He states that for future studies, we will use imaging techniques like MRI and magnetoencephalography to examine differences in functional and structural connectivity between controls and anhedonics in the dorsal and ventral striatum.
About this news about movement research and anhedonia
Author: Patrick Lejtenyi
Source: Concordia University
Contact: Patrick Lejtenyi – Concordia University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
According to Isaac Romkey and al., “people with musical anhedonia continue to have a pleasurable urge to move to music.” PLOS One
Abstract
People with musical anhedonia continue to experience the enjoyable urge to move to music.
In cognitive science, the sensation of “groove” has been defined as the pleasurable urge to move to music.
When listeners rate rhythmic stimuli on derived pleasure and the desire to move, these factors have a strong correlation with their ratings. However, recent studies in brain and behavioural imaging have demonstrated that these two elements may be separate.
Our study examines the sensation of groove in people who have a particular musical anhedonia to examine whether these two might be related. Individuals with musical anhedonia have a diminished capacity to derive pleasure from music but are still able to derive pleasure from other types of entertainment ( such as sex and food ).
People with musical anhedonia were identified as those with scores in the lower 10 % of scores on the Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire, but who had no deficits in music perception, no symptoms of depression, average levels of physical and social anhedonia, and sensitivity to punishment and reward.
We predicted that people with musical anhedonia would experience lower levels of derived pleasure but have comparable ratings of moving desire if the two components of groove were separable.
Groove responses were measured in an online study ( N = 148 ) using a set of experimenter-generated musical stimuli varying in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, which were validated in several previous studies.
Surprisingly, we found no discernible differences between the responses of individuals with musical anhedonia ( n = 17 ) and matched control ( n = 17 ) in the groove response. The anhedonia sample’s mediation analyses revealed that wanting to move ratings fully mediated the influence of rhythmic and harmonic complexity on pleasure ratings.
These findings, taken together, show that the urge to move may make up for the blunted pleasure experience experienced by those who have musical anhedonia.
These findings, in general, suggest that the urge to move is the main reason for the groove response’s pleasure.
