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Relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words. In adults, recent experiments have shown that intrinsic reward signals accompany successful word learning from context. In addition, the experience of reward facilitated long‐term memory for words. In adolescence, developmental changes are seen in reward and motivation systems as well as in reading and language systems. Here, in the face of this developmental change, we ask whether adolescents experience reward from word learning, and how the reward and memory benefit seen in adults is modulated by age. We used a naturalistic reading paradigm, which involved extracting novel word meanings from sentence context without the need for explicit feedback. By exploring ratings of enjoyment during the learning phase, as well as recognition memory for words a day later, we assessed whether adolescents show the same reward and learning patterns as adults. We tested 345 children between the ages of 10–18 (N > 84 in each 2‐year age‐band) using this paradigm. We found evidence for our first prediction: children aged 10–18 report greater enjoyment for successful word learning. However, we did not find evidence for age‐related change in this developmental period, or memory benefits. This work gives us greater insight into the process of language acquisition and sets the stage for further investigations of intrinsic reward in typical and atypical development. Research Highlights: We constantly learn words from context, even in the absence of explicit rewards or feedback.In adults, intrinsic reward experienced during word learning is linked to a dopaminergic circuit in the brain, which also fuels enhancements in memory for words.We find adolescents also report enhanced reward or enjoyment when they successfully learn words from sentence context.The relationship between reward and learning is maintained between the ages of 10 and 18.Unlike in adults, we did not observe ensuing memory benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation ("not") and intensifiers ("really") on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., "good") in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., "not bad" represented as "good"); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time. Negation is an important concept in natural language but we still know relatively little about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning negation. Combining behavioral and neurophysiological data, this study shows that humans first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well‐known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self‐selected rewarding songs in a proof‐of‐concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing literature has identified the social dimension as one of the crucial mechanisms behind musical pleasure. However, the effect of the social context on the emotional experience associated with music remains unclear. Indeed, some previous studies observed no significant differences between listening to music in a group and alone in terms of emotional responses. In contrast, listening to music with a close friend or a partner has been associated with higher responses of pleasure and enjoyment compared to listening alone. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the effect of music listening in a group versus solo context focusing specifically on pleasure-related responses. In addition, we conducted an exploration of the individual factors which may impact on the experience of reward. Forty-one healthy participants were asked to provide pleasure-related ratings whilst undergoing music listening sessions both individually and in a group. We found higher self-reported pleasure and other related emotional responses when participants were listening to music alone rather than in a group. Also, the exploration of the underlying mechanisms of the relationship between listening pleasure and the social context revealed that concentration was not a determinant of musical pleasure, and that a higher feeling of connection with the colisteners was associated with higher pleasure ratings in the group condition, even though knowing someone in the group did not increase pleasure. In light of our findings, we discuss strengths and limitations of our and previous solo versus group music-based studies, and suggest how to potentially foster pleasure-related responses in social music contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 pandemic has deeply affected the mental health of millions of people. We assessed which of many leisure activities correlated with positive mental health outputs, with particular attention to music, which has been reported to be important for coping with the psychological burden of the pandemic. Questionnaire data from about 1000 individuals primarily from Italy, Spain, and the United States during May–June 2020 show that people picked music activities (listening to, playing, singing, etc.) most often as the leisure experiences that helped them the most to cope with psychological distress related with the pandemic. During the pandemic, hours of engagement in music and food‐related activities were associated with lower depressive symptoms. The negative correlation between music and depression was mediated by individual differences in sensitivity to reward, whereas the correlation between food‐related activities and improved mental health outputs was explained by differences in emotion suppression strategies. Our results, while correlational, suggest that engaging in music activities could be related to improved well‐being with the underlying mechanism being related to reward, consistent with neuroscience findings. Our data have practical significance in pointing to effective strategies to cope with mental health issues beyond those related to the COVID‐19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and purpose: This study was undertaken to determine and compare lesion patterns and structural dysconnectivity underlying poststroke aprosodia and amusia, using a data‐driven multimodal neuroimaging approach. Methods: Thirty‐nine patients with right or left hemisphere stroke were enrolled in a cohort study and tested for linguistic and affective prosody perception and musical pitch and rhythm perception at subacute and 3‐month poststroke stages. Participants listened to words spoken with different prosodic stress that changed their meaning, and to words spoken with six different emotions, and chose which meaning or emotion was expressed. In the music tasks, participants judged pairs of short melodies as the same or different in terms of pitch or rhythm. Structural magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired at both stages, and machine learning‐based lesion–symptom mapping and deterministic tractography were used to identify lesion patterns and damaged white matter pathways giving rise to aprosodia and amusia. Results: Both aprosodia and amusia were behaviorally strongly correlated and associated with similar lesion patterns in right frontoinsular and striatal areas. In multiple regression models, reduced fractional anisotropy and lower tract volume of the right inferior fronto‐occipital fasciculus were the strongest predictors for both disorders, over time. Conclusions: These results highlight a common origin of aprosodia and amusia, both arising from damage and disconnection of the right ventral auditory stream integrating rhythmic–melodic acoustic information in prosody and music. Comorbidity of these disabilities may worsen the prognosis and affect rehabilitation success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]