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The role of the extended MNS in emotional and nonemotional judgments of human song

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Abstract

In the present study, we examined the involvement of the extended mirror neuron system (MNS)—specifically, areas that have a strong functional connection to the core system itself—during emotional and nonemotional judgments about human song. We presented participants with audiovisual recordings of sung melodic intervals (two-tone sequences) and manipulated emotion and pitch judgments while keeping the stimuli identical. Mu event-related desynchronization (ERD) was measured as an index of MNS activity, and a source localization procedure was performed on the data to isolate the brain sources contributing to this ERD. We found that emotional judgments of human song led to greater amounts of ERD than did pitch distance judgments (nonemotional), as well as control judgments related to the singer’s hair, or pitch distance judgments about a synthetic tone sequence. Our findings support and expand recent research suggesting that the extended MNS is involved to a greater extent during emotional than during nonemotional perception of human action.

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Author note

This research was supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) awarded to the first author and a Discovery grant from NSERC awarded to the third author. Additional funding was provided by Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing (AIRS), a Major Collaborative Research Initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (www.airsplace.ca). Thank you to Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor and Tristan Defrancesco-Loria for assistance with data collection. The authors report no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Lucy M. McGarry & Frank A. Russo

  2. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Jaime A. Pineda

  3. Psychology Department, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B2K3, Canada

    Lucy M. McGarry

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  1. Lucy M. McGarry
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  3. Frank A. Russo
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Correspondence to Lucy M. McGarry.

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McGarry, L.M., Pineda, J.A. & Russo, F.A. The role of the extended MNS in emotional and nonemotional judgments of human song. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 15, 32–44 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-014-0311-x

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