New Citations | Brain Response and Music, BRS Indicating Stress, & Dopamine and Substance Abuse

Brain Connectivity and Human Responses to Music: While it has been proven that people find music aesthetically appealing because of neural circuitry, it is unclear why individuals received different levels of enjoyment to different types of music. Researchers from Wesleyan University used a combination of survey data and behavioral and psychophysiological measures to try and understand what drives individual variation of music enjoyment. Psychophysiolocal data was collected using BIOPAC Data Acquisition System and recorded to a computer running AcqKnowledge. Find the study here.

BRS as a Stress Indicator: Baroreflex Sensitivity (BRS) has been largely ignored as a potential cardiovascular measure to indicate stress. Amanda Anderson and her team from Iowa State University performed an experiment that examined the extent to which BRS changed in response to acute psychological and physical stressors. Data was collected from participants using a BioNomadix wireless ECG amplifier connected to a BIOPAC Research System. Read the study here.

Dopamine and Substance Abuse: Researchers from Texas A&M University recently studied whether striatal dopamine (dopamine from the part of the brain that makes up the reward system) impacts whether people externalize poor decision making. This was to investigate what part of decision making process makes people with substance abuse issues project their susceptibility to substances on to something other than themselves. Striatal dopamine levels were operationalized using spontaneous eyeblink rate recorded from a BIOPAC EOG100C amplifier. Find the full experiment here.