Music and Depression
The overall goal of this project is to explore and compare differences in affective responses to music between a non-clinical population and a sample with Major Depressive Disorder. It was generally believed that because people with MDD usually have lower level of interest or pleasure, they would tend to enjoy music less than normal. However, such a view was challenged by recent research that shows the level of music appreciation participants with MDD possess is not lower than that of the non-clinical population. This surprising finding leads to the question the proposed project attempts to answer: If depressive people hold an overall same level of music appreciation ability, do their specific affective responses differentiate from the euthymic responses? If so, how does depression affect such responses? This project aims at answering these questions by collecting and comparing evoked emotional responses to different types of music among healthy participants and participants with MDD. More specifically, how do people with MDD respond differently to different types of music (sad, pleasant, popular, country, rock…)? Are they negatively or positively biased and do they favor or detest a specific genre? Hopefully by trying to answer these questions, some insights could be provided on musical emotion processing in population with MDD.
Published Paper / Presentations
Poincot A, Spivack S, Tossavainen D, McClelland SE, Ienner G, Cranmer LE, Wallisch P (2019). No anhedonia for music in major depressive disorder. 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Chicago, IL.