In the PROMUS Lab, we study affective neuroscience, specifically how music, emotion-processing and decision-making intersect. To understand how those processes interact, we study emotion and reward processing across a range of health issues, including how emotion in music is represented in the brain and how that is affected by mood disorders, fibromyalgia and pain, Alzheimer’s disease and other chronic conditions.

We try to understand why people engage with music and how they use music to regulate their mood states, experience of pain and other psychological and physiological symptoms. We combine scientific methodology, imaging techniques and music theory in our research to investigate how information is transmitted through music, how listeners parse that information in a meaningful way and how music impacts the central nervous system in humans. Learn more about our research. >