Summary: A new Concordia University study shows that the pleasurable urge to move to music—commonly called “groove”—is a distinct physiological reaction that can occur independently of general musical enjoyment. Researchers tested people with musical anhedonia, who experience little or no pleasure from music, and found they still felt a strong impulse to move when hearing rhythmic beats.
Participants rated both how much pleasure they felt and how strongly the music made them want to move. The results suggest that the act of moving, or the urge to move, can itself generate pleasure for people with musical anhedonia. Contrary to expectations, these individuals demonstrated groove responses similar to non-anhedonic listeners, indicating that rhythm-driven movement engages brain circuits differently from those that underlie musical enjoyment.
Key Facts
- Movement-driven pleasure: Individuals with musical anhedonia still report a strong urge to move to rhythmic music, even when they do not report increased musical pleasure.
- Distinct neural sources: The dorsal striatum, associated with motor functions and the urge to move, may drive groove responses, while the ventral striatum, tied to reward processing, appears more involved in the subjective pleasure of listening to music.
- Planned brain imaging: Researchers intend to study functional and structural connectivity differences in dorsal and ventral striatum using MRI and magnetoencephalography to better understand how these circuits support groove and musical reward.
Source: Concordia University
The pleasurable urge to move to music—known as groove—appears to be a physiological response separate from how much pleasure people derive from music generally, according to new research led by Concordia University psychologists.
The study found that the groove response remains robust even in people with musical anhedonia, a condition in which listeners gain little or no pleasure from music. Isaac Romkey, a PhD student in Concordia’s Department of Psychology and the paper’s lead author, reports in PLOS One that while pleasure and urge to move are often closely linked, they can be dissociated.
To investigate, Romkey and colleagues presented more than 50 short musical excerpts that varied in rhythmic and harmonic complexity to listeners with and without musical anhedonia. People classified as musically anhedonic were selected on the basis of very low scores on the Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire but were otherwise typical: they reported normal pleasure from other rewards (such as food or sex), had intact pitch and beat perception, and showed no symptoms of depression.
After each excerpt, participants rated how pleasurable they found the music and how strongly it made them want to move. Prior work predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between rhythmic complexity and groove—moderately complex rhythms typically elicit the strongest urge to move compared with very simple or very complex rhythms.
The authors expected that people with musical anhedonia would give lower pleasure ratings while still reporting comparable urges to move. Surprisingly, the study found no significant differences between anhedonics and matched controls on either pleasure or urge-to-move ratings. Mediation analyses revealed that, for participants with musical anhedonia, ratings of wanting to move fully mediated the relationship between rhythmic and harmonic complexity and reported pleasure. In other words, the urge to move appeared to be a primary driver of the pleasure they did report.
“We anticipated a flattened U-shaped curve in the anhedonia group,” Romkey explains, “but instead we found that their pleasure was closely tied to the urge to move. This suggests that moving—or wanting to move—may itself be a source of pleasure.”
Same response, different sources
The mechanisms behind musical anhedonia remain under investigation, and there is evidence it may be heritable. The current findings align with a model in which separate neural circuits contribute to different elements of groove: the dorsal striatum, a motor-related region, is linked to the urge to move, while the ventral striatum, a core reward center, is more closely tied to experienced musical pleasure.
Future work will use neuroimaging—functional and structural MRI as well as magnetoencephalography—to examine how connectivity within and between dorsal and ventral striatal circuits differs between people with musical anhedonia and controls. Those studies aim to map how rhythm perception, motor planning, and reward signaling interact to produce the complex experience of groove.
About this music anhedonia and movement research news
Author: Patrick Lejtenyi
Source: Concordia University
Contact: Patrick Lejtenyi – Concordia University
Image credit: Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access. Study title: “The pleasurable urge to move to music is unchanged in people with musical anhedonia” by Isaac Romkey et al., published in PLOS One.
Abstract
The pleasurable urge to move to music is unchanged in people with musical anhedonia
Groove describes the pleasurable urge to move in response to music. When listeners rate rhythmic stimuli for pleasure and the desire to move, scores on those dimensions are typically correlated, but recent behavioral and imaging work suggests they can be dissociated.
This study tested that potential separability by examining groove responses in people with specific musical anhedonia—individuals who have reduced ability to derive pleasure from music while retaining typical reward responses in other domains. Musical anhedonics were identified as those scoring in the lowest decile on the Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire, with intact music perception and no signs of depression.
In an online experiment (N = 148) using validated musical stimuli that varied in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, we measured participants’ pleasure and urge-to-move ratings. Contrary to predictions, groove responses did not differ significantly between the musical anhedonia group (n = 17) and a matched control group (n = 17). Mediation analyses indicated that in the anhedonia sample, wanting-to-move ratings fully mediated the effect of musical complexity on pleasure.
These findings suggest that the urge to move compensates for the blunted pleasure response in musical anhedonia and that the desire to move may itself be a primary source of groove-related pleasure.