Music Affects Brain's Emotional Flexibility

As emotions rise and fall in everyday life, your brain keeps up, constantly adjusting. These transitions between feelings—like joy, sadness, or fear—aren’t just random reactions. They’re part of a highly organized process that helps guide behavior and decision-making, according to a new research.

Researchers from Columbia University, led by neuroscientist Matthew Sachs, recently explored this complex emotional process using music. Their work, published in the journal eNeuro, looked at how the brain switches between emotions and how past feelings shape present ones.

The findings also shows that not only does the brain actively track these changes in feelings, but it also adjusts its response depending on the emotional situation that came just before.

To study emotional transitions in the brain, Sachs and his team worked with composers to write original musical pieces. These compositions were carefully crafted to move listeners through different emotional states—such as happiness, sadness, and tension—at specific points in the music.

A group of 39 participants (20 male, 19 female) listened to the music while undergoing functional MRI (fMRI) scans. This allowed researchers to capture detailed images of brain activity in real time. As participants moved through the emotional journey of the music, the scientists tracked how the brain responded.

The songs didn’t just stir up feelings—they acted as tools for understanding how emotions work in the brain. By manipulating the emotional context of the music, the team was able to see how brain activity changed depending on what emotion had come just before.

The brain doesn’t just react to an emotion—it maps it out. Sachs and his team used both data-driven analysis, such as Hidden Markov modeling, and theory-based methods to interpret the brain scans. What they found was striking: patterns of activation along the brain’s temporal-parietal axis clearly reflected emotional transitions.

This region of the brain helps with processing sounds and interpreting social signals. When a participant’s emotional state changed in response to music, this part of the brain showed clear changes too. These neural changes weren’t random—they had both spatial and temporal signatures, meaning they could be pinpointed in both location and timing.

Even more fascinating was how timing changed depending on emotional context. When the new emotion was similar in valence—like going from happiness to calm instead of from happiness to sadness—the transition in brain activity happened earlier. That means your brain shifts more smoothly and quickly between similar emotions.

Understanding these emotional transitions isn’t just interesting—it could be life-changing for people struggling with mental health. Many people with mood disorders, such as depression, experience what scientists call emotional rigidity. They get stuck in a single emotional state, unable to shift easily.

Sachs believes this new research might lead to better treatment tools. "We know that people who suffer from mood disorders or depression often demonstrate emotional rigidity, where they basically get stuck in an emotional state," he says. "This study suggests that maybe we could take someone with depression, for instance, and use the approach we developed to identify neural markers for the emotional rigidity that keeps them in a very negative state."