Unlock the Power of Emotions: Music, Cognition & Motivation - Essay Sample

Cognition, emotion, and motivation are the backbones of psychological study. The essential components of emotions that studies have focused on since the history of psychology include fear, happiness, pleasure, anger, and disgust, among others. Different external forces, such as music, have unique effects on these emotions. For instance, different forms of music can either evoke fear or joy. Therefore, emotions occur as a result of different adaptive behavior from the ambient surrounding as well as the internal physiological and psychological changes. Understanding the brain chemistry and human interaction with the external environment forms the basis for behavioral research, physiology, and psychology studies. The analysis of emotions stems from the researches on cognition, emotion, and motivation. The current study thus focuses on establishing a comprehensive knowledge of the emotional processes in light of their mechanisms, functions, and evolutionary significance.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

Social cognitive studies have determined that the intrinsic emotional expressions, particularly those of facial communication or vocalization, concentrate on specific regions of the brain. They impact these regions, for instance, the amygdala of the brain, by initiating specific responses. The response of the senses could either be through fear or amusement. The role of music as a powerful way of expressing emotions remains the focus of affective neuroscience. Part of these studies aims to understand the neural substrate that is at the core of the processing of emotions. Hypothetically, there are biological factors attributed to emotional music and the corresponding emotional expressions. The evidence-based studies on fear across the different human senses analyze the responses from the functional magnetic resonance against the fundamental emotions of fear, happiness, or sadness (Aubé et al., 2015).

The study of social cognitive, emotional expressions, and affective neuroscience relies on the understanding of superficial amygdala. The amygdala, together with the auditory cortex, plays a pivotal role in the effects of emotional music on emotional expressions (Koelsch et al., 2013). The research analysis on correlations between neural response and the music-evoked emotions are minimal, thus limiting the understanding of the significance and impacts of the superficial amygdala. In addition to that, certain medical conditions, such as neurofibromatosis type 1 in children, enhance the study of facial emotion recognition (Lewis et al., 2017). Key areas of concern for the research include the roles of the frontal regulatory circuits and the states of the mind.

The neuropsychological research of the topic deals with the different ways that the brain responds to stimuli of music, vocalizations, and facial expressions, among others. It also examines the different scholarly works on conscious and unconscious states of human emotions, the scientific principles behind the functions of superficial amygdala, frontal regulatory circuits, and the auditory cortex, and how they relate to external stimuli. Other areas of focus of the analysis include the recognition of emotions, primarily through studying neurofibromatosis type 1 among children to determine facial emotion recognition, face scan paths, and face perception.