Complementarity As Generative Principle: A Thought Pattern for Aesthetic Appreciations and Cognitive Appraisals in General.

In experimental aesthetics the relationship between the arts and cognitive neuroscience has gained particular interest in recent years. But has cognitive neuroscience indeed something to offer when studying the arts? Here we present a theoretical frame within which the concept of complementarity as a generative or creative principle is proposed; neurocognitive processes are characterized by the duality of complementary activities like bottom-up and top-down control, or logistical functions like temporal control and content functions like perceptions in the neural machinery. On that basis a thought pattern is suggested for aesthetic appreciations and cognitive appraisals in general.

Sadness is unique: neural processing of emotions in speech prosody in musicians and non-musicians.

Musical training has been shown to have positive effects on several aspects of speech processing, however, the effects of musical training on the neural processing of speech prosody conveying distinct emotions are yet to be better understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the neural responses to speech prosody conveying happiness, sadness, and fear differ between musicians and non-musicians. Differences in processing of emotional speech prosody between the two groups were only observed when sadness was expressed.

Differences between musicians and non-musicians in neuro-affective processing of sadness and fear expressed in music.

Music is known to convey and evoke emotional states. Musical training has been argued to lead to changes in neural architecture and enhanced processing of emotions. It is not clear, however, whether musical training is also associated with changes in behavioral and neural responses to musically conveyed discrete emotions.

Personality traits modulate neural responses to emotions expressed in music.

Music communicates and evokes emotions. The number of studies on the neural correlates of musical emotion processing is increasing but few have investigated the factors that modulate these neural activations. Previous research has shown that personality traits account for individual variability of neural responses.