Music-emotion EEG coupling effects based on representational similarity

Background: Music can evoke intense emotions and music emotion is a complex cognitive process. However, we know little about the cognitive mechanisms underlying these processes, and there are significant individual differences in the emotional responses to the same musical stimuli.New Method: We used the inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) method to investigate the shared music emotion responses across multiple participants. In addition, we extended IS-RSA to estimate the group cross-frequency coupling effects of music emotion. Based on the cross-frequency coupling IS-RSA, we analyzed the differences in cross-frequency coupling patterns under different music emotions using MI. Comparison of existing methods: most current IS-RSA analyses focus on within-frequency band analysis. However, the cognitive processing of music emotion involves not only activation and brain network connections differences within frequency bands but also information communication between frequency bands.Results: The results of the within-frequency band IS-RSA analysis showed that the theta and gamma frequency bands play important roles in the inter-participant consistency of music emotion. The inter-frequency band ISRSA analysis showed that the theta-beta coupling pattern exhibited stronger inter-participant consistency compared to the theta-gamma coupling pattern, and the theta-beta coupling had significant consistent representation across various music conditions. Through the significant regions of cross-frequency coupling representation similarity analysis, we performed phase-amplitude coupling analysis on FC4-C6 and FC4-Pz connections. For the theta-beta coupling pattern, we found that the MI of these two connections exhibited different coupling patterns under different music conditions, and they showed a significant decrease compared to the baseline period.