How musical training shapes cognition of emotions: A neuro-psychological study with Indian Classical Music

Music is one of the most effective art-forms to elicit emotions in humans. Using this property, we have used Sitar-renditions of Indian Classical Music (ICM) as input stimuli to study and compare three emotional states viz. happiness, sadness, and calmness in two groups of participants, one with prior Indian-music training of more than 5 years, and the other group without any such training, both from the perspective of psychological and neuro-cognitive studies. An Emotion-Rating-Survey was first performed on 100-participants to understand the emotional-quotient of each clip separately, and analyze the comparative emotion-perception levels in trainee-musicians (TM) and non-trainees (NT), which revealed mostly higher elicitation-levels in NT. Clips showing highest intensity-levels of happiness, sadness and calmness were next chosen for the EEG (Electroencephalography) experiment, which was performed on 20 participants (10 TM, 10 NT) to study and compare the corresponding alpha-theta neural-signal characteristics, and cross-correlation trends. Using robust non-linear techniques of MFDFA and MFDXA, the signal-complexity, asymmetry, and inter-hemispheric cross-correlation patterns in the extracted neural-responses were computed and thereafter verified statistically. Using rest-condition as baseline, results showed majorly alpha-theta suppression(lower complexity) for music-generated emotion states of happiness, sadness and calmness in both TM and NT-groups, and a distinct trend of higher inter-hemispheric lobe-connectivity in parietal and occipital lobes of TM. This might be attributed to years of musical-training, strongly affecting neural-connectivity and hemispheric-synchronization. This study explores how the two participant-groups react to the three target emotional-states generated from instrumental-renditions of ICM, and what neural parameters work as markers of prior-Indian-musical-training.