From emotion perception to emotion experience: Emotions evoked by pictures and classical music Thomas Baumgartner * , Michaela Esslen, Lutz Ja ¨ncke * Institute for Psychology, Division Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, Treichlerstrasse 10, CH-8032 Zu ¨ rich, Switzerland Received 16 December 2004; received in revised form 11 March 2005; accepted 14 April 2005 Available online 5 July 2005 Abstract Most previous neurophysiological studies evoked emotions by presenting visual stimuli. Models of the emotion circuits in the brain have for the most part ignored emotions arising from musical stimuli. To our knowledge, this is the first emotion brain study which examined the influence of visual and musical stimuli on brain processing. Highly arousing pictures of the International Affective Picture System and classical musical excerpts were chosen to evoke the three basic emotions of happiness, sadness and fear. The emotional stimuli modalities were presented for 70 s either alone or combined (congruent) in a counterbalanced and random order. Electroencephalogram (EEG) Alpha- Power-Density, which is inversely related to neural electrical activity, in 30 scalp electrodes from 24 right-handed healthy female subjects, was recorded. In addition, heart rate (HR), skin conductance responses (SCR), respiration, temperature and psychometrical ratings were collected. Results showed that the experienced quality of the presented emotions was most accurate in the combined conditions, intermediate in the picture conditions and lowest in the sound conditions. Furthermore, both the psychometrical ratings and the physiological involvement measurements (SCR, HR, Respiration) were significantly increased in the combined and sound conditions compared to the picture conditions. Finally, repeated measures ANOVA revealed the largest Alpha-Power-Density for the sound conditions, intermediate for the picture conditions, and lowest for the combined conditions, indicating the strongest activation in the combined conditions in a distributed emotion and arousal network comprising frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital neural structures. Summing up, these findings demonstrate that music can markedly enhance the emotional experience evoked by affective pictures. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: EEG; Emotion; Perception; Feelings; Picture; Music; Psychophysiology 1. Introduction Most of the published neuroimaging papers examining emotional processes have used visual stimuli in order to evoke emotions. In the majority of these studies either the Pictures of Facial Affect by Ekman and Friesen (1976) or the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) by Lang et al. (1995) have been used as stimulus material (e.g. Lee et al., 2004; Esslen et al., 2004; Hariri et al., 2002). This material is composed of stimuli using either facial expres- sions or scenes thought to evoke basic emotions (positive or negative). However, it is obvious that real-life emotional experiences mostly rely on the presence of combined stimuli coming from different modalities. For example, music is often used to enhance the emotional impact of movies. Although this enhancing effect of combined presentation of emotional music and visual stimuli is intuitive, modern neuroimaging research has mostly ignored the neurophysio- logical underpinnings of this enhancement effect. Even the neurophysiological study of emotional experiences associ- ated with the perception of music has been understudied. Emotional appreciation of music is a new research avenue in neuropsychology and neurophysiology (Peretz, 2001). Nevertheless, the results of these few studies are remark- able. It has been shown that music elicits intense emotional responses that activate brain regions thought to be involved 0167-8760/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2005.04.007 * Corresponding authors. Thomas Baumgartner is to be contacted at tel.: +41 44 634 1574; fax: +41 44 634 4342. Lutz Ja ¨ncke, tel.: +41 44 634 2192; fax: +41 44 634 4342. E-mail addresses: t.baumgartner@psychologie.unizh.ch (T. Baumgartner), l.jaencke@psychologie.unizh.ch (L. Ja ¨ncke). International Journal of Psychophysiology 60 (2006) 34 – 43 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpsycho