Personality Traits Modulate Neural Responses to Emotions Expressed in Music.

Music communicates and evokes emotions. The number of studies on the neural correlates of emotion and music is increasing but only few have investigated the factors that modulate these neural activations. As previous research has shown that personality traits account for individual variability of neural responses we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how the dimensions Extraversion and Neuroticism are related to differences in brain reactivity to musical stimuli expressing the emotions happiness, sadness and fear. 12 participants (7 female, M=20.33 years) completed the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) and were scanned while performing a passive listening task. Neurofunctional analyses revealed significant positive correlations between Neuroticism score and activations in bilateral basal ganglia, insula and orbitofrontal cortex in response to music expressing happiness. Extraversion scores were marginally negatively correlated with activations in the right amygdala in response to music expressing fear. Our findings show that subjects' personality may have a predictive power in the neural correlates of emotional processing expressed in music and should be considered in context of experimental groups homogeneity.
Copyright © 2013. Published by Elsevier B.V.
PMID: 23732338