Music-emotion EEG coupling effects based on representational similarity

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. 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. 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 IS-RSA 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. •We designed a musical emotion to explore the cognitive process of musical emotions.•We used representational similarity analysis between subjects to study the common reactions between subjects under positive music, negative music and mixed music.•We have extended the inter-subject representation similarity analyze to explore the cross -frequency coupling effects between subjects.•We investigated the coupling modes of the consistent regions of cross frequency coupling between participants and found that positive music and negative music have different coupling modes.