Similarly, future thinking reduces cortisol levels following social stress 17.
For example, thoughts focused on the future 15 or rated as interesting 16 lead to subsequent positive mood. Studies have also pointed to a key role of the qualitative features of participants’ thoughts in adaptive forms of mind-wandering. Although there is robust evidence of an association between mind-wandering and negative affect in healthy 6 as well as depressed individuals 14, it has also been shown that this relationship is strongly mediated by the content of thoughts, with past-related thoughts being linked to higher levels of unhappiness 10, 15. Research has revealed that affective processes have an important impact on spontaneous thoughts. Mind-wandering is associated with benefits such as facilitating creative problem solving 11 and delaying gratification 12, but also with costs such as disrupting ongoing task performance 13. Humans spend a substantial amount of time mind-wandering 6, predominantly about matters of self-importance 7, social relationships 8, future planning 9, and autobiographical memories 10. Mind-wandering is a form of self-generated thought, which involves overcoming the constraints of the “here and now” by immersing in one’s own stream of consciousness 5. Since the ability for self-reflection crucially requires internally-directed cognition 4, which is typical of mind-wandering, we sought to investigate the influence of sad and happy music on mind-wandering episodes.
In a previous study 3 we found that a common use of sad (but not happy) music is to enhance self-reflection. Sad- and happy-sounding music (henceforth referred to as sad and happy music) exist at least since antiquity, as witnessed for example from the Greek music system (6th century BC), which ascribed certain emotional qualities, including sadness and happiness, to the unique sound of musical modes.Īlthough over the last decade neuroscience has provided numerous insights into how sad and happy music modulate activity in brain structures involved in emotion 2, the effects of sad and happy music on cognition remain elusive. Sadness and happiness are among the most frequent emotions evoked by music cross-culturally 1. The ubiquity of music in human culture owes to its capability to evoke and enhance a wide range of emotions. These findings call for a systematic investigation of the relation between music and thought, having broad implications for the use of music in education and clinical settings. Importantly, our results also underscore that DMN activity can be modulated as a function of sad and happy music. happy music, people withdraw their attention inwards and engage in spontaneous, self-referential cognitive processes. Thus, our results demonstrate that, when listening to sad vs. In three experiments we found that sad music, compared with happy music, is associated with stronger mind-wandering (Experiments 1A and 1B) and greater centrality of the nodes of the Default Mode Network (DMN) (Experiment 2). Here we use probe-caught thought sampling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the influence of sad and happy music on mind-wandering and its underlying neuronal mechanisms.
However, effects of music evoking different emotional experiences such as sadness and happiness on cognition, and in particular on self-generated thought, are unknown. Music is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human cultures, mostly due to its power to evoke and regulate emotions.