I NDIVIDUAL D IFFERENCES IN M USIC R EWARD E XPERIENCES E RNEST MAS -H ERRERO Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group, (IDIBELL), Barcelona, Spain J OSEP MARCO -PALLARES University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain U RBANO L ORENZO -S EVA Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain R OBERT J. Z ATORRE Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, & International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Montreal, Canada A NTONI R ODRIGUEZ -F ORNELLS Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group, (IDIBELL), Institucio ´ Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), & University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain MUSIC IS ONE OF THE MOST PLEASANT HUMAN experiences, even though it has no direct biological advantage. However little is known about individual differences in how people experience reward in music- related activities. The goal of the present study was to describe the main facets of music experience that could explain the variance observed in how people experience reward associated with music. To this end we developed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), which was administrated to three large samples. Our results showed that the musical reward experience can be decomposed into five reliable factors: Musical Seek- ing, Emotion Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, and Sensory-Motor. These factors were corre- lated with socio-demographic factors and measures of general sensitivity to reward and hedonic experience. We propose that the five-factor structure of musical reward experience might be very relevant in the study of psychological and neural bases of emotion and plea- sure associated to music. Received: June 27, 2012, accepted March 1, 2013. Key words: sensitivity to music, sensitivity to reward, individual differences, musical reward, music processing I T IS GENERALLY AGREED THAT MUSIC IS ONE OF the most pleasurable stimuli and that it has an important role in emotion evocation and mood reg- ulation (Dube ´ & Le Bel, 2003; Juslin & Va ¨stfja ¨ll, 2008; Schellenberg, 2003). This is the case even though music, like other aesthetic stimuli, is abstract and does not directly imply any obvious natural advantage, as do other biological reinforcers such as sex or food. It has been empirically demonstrated using behavioral mea- sures that music elicits emotional responses that are accompanied by physiological changes (Altenmu ¨ller, Schu ¨rmann, Lim, & Parlitz, 2002; Baumgartner, Esslen, & Ja ¨ncke, 2006; Krumhansl, 1997; Salimpoor, Benovoy, Longo, Cooperstock, & Zatorre, 2009; Sammler, Gri- gutsch, Fritz, & Koelsch, 2007; Sloboda & Juslin, 2001). In addition, several neuroimaging studies have shown the activation of emotion and reward-related brain networks during pleasurable music listening (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Brown, Martinez, & Parsons, 2004; Koelsch, Fritz, Mu ¨ller & Friederici, 2006; Menon & Levitin, 2005; Mitterschiffthaler, Fu, Dalton, Andrew, & Williams, 2007; for a review, see Koelsch, 2010). More recent data indicate the involvement of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward processing in association with musical pleasure (Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher, & Zatorre, 2011; for a review, see Zald & Zatorre, 2011). In addition, several lesion studies have shown the selec- tive involvement of the amygdala and the medial tem- poral lobe (parahippocampal cortex) in the evaluation of emotional responses to music (Dellacherie, Ehrle ´, & Samson, 2008; Gosselin et al., 2005, 2006; Khalfa, Roy, Rainville, Dalla Bella, & Peretz, 2008). Thus, the involvement of reward and emotional brain circuits for music could explain the widespread value people assign to music, and may be crucial for understanding why this human activity persists across cultures and generations (Zald & Zatorre, 2011). However, even considering the strong emotional impact of music in humans, these affective responses are highly specific to cultural and personal preferences, and large individual differences are observed across individuals in how music is experienced. Indeed, little is known about the sources of this interindividual var- iability in musical reward experiences, or to what degree the differences in the amount of pleasure experienced in music listening are related to personality variables, or Music Perception, VOLUME 31, ISSUE 2, PP. 118–138, ISSN 0730-7829, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8312.  2013 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS ’ S RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS WEBSITE, HTTP:// WWW. UCPRESSJOURNALS . COM/ REPRINTINFO. ASP. DOI: 10.1525/ MP.2013.31.2.118 118 Ernest Mas-Herrero, Josep Marco-Pallares, Urbano Lorenzo-Seva, Robert J. Zatorre, & Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells