Basic, specific, mechanistic? Conceptualizing musical emotions in the brain

The number of studies investigating music processing in the human brain continues to increase, with a large proportion of them focussing on the correlates of so‐called musical emotions. The current Review highlights the recent development whereby such studies are no longer concerned only with basic emotions such as happiness and sadness but also with so‐called music‐specific or “aesthetic” ones such as nostalgia and wonder. It also highlights how mechanisms such as expectancy and empathy, which are seen as inducing musical emotions, are enjoying ever‐increasing investigation and substantiation with physiological and neuroimaging methods. It is proposed that a combination of these approaches, namely, investigation of the precise mechanisms through which so‐called music‐specific or aesthetic emotions may arise, will provide the most important advances for our understanding of the unique nature of musical experience.