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Pain-reducing effects of music listening are well-established, but the effects are small and their clinical relevance questionable. Recent theoretical advances, however, have proposed that synchronizing to music, such as clapping, tapping or dancing, has evolutionarily important social effects that are associated with activation of the endogenous opioid system (which supports both analgesia and social bonding). Thus, active sensorimotor synchronization to music could have stronger analgesic effects than simply listening to music. In this study, we show that sensorimotor synchronization to music significantly amplifies the pain-reducing effects of music listening. Using pressure algometry to the fingernails, pain stimuli were delivered to n = 59 healthy adults either during music listening or silence, while either performing an active tapping task or a passive control task. Compared to silence without tapping, music with tapping (but not simply listening to music) reduced pain with a large, clinically significant, effect size (d = 0.93). Simply tapping without music did not elicit such an effect. Our analyses indicate that both attentional and emotional mechanisms drive the pain-reducing effects of sensorimotor synchronization to music, and that tapping to music in addition to merely listening to music may enhance pain-reducing effects in both clinical contexts and everyday life.

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the novel abstract concepts. Feature production after training showed that specifically emotion features enriched the emotional concepts’ representations. Unexpectedly, for participants engaging in a vivid mental imagery during training a higher semantic richness of the acquired emotional concepts slowed down lexical decisions. Rephrasing, in turn, promoted a better learning and processing performance than imagery, probably due to stronger established lexical associations. Our results confirm the importance of emotional and linguistic experience and additional deep lexico-semantic processing for the acquisition, representation and processing of abstract concepts.

According to the embodied cognition framework, the formation of conceptual representations integrates the type of experience during learning. In this electroencephalographic study, we applied a linguistic variant of a training paradigm, in which participants learned to associate novel names to novel tools while either manipulating or visually exploring them. The analysis focused on event-related desynchronization (ERD) of oscillations in the mu and beta frequency range, which reflects activation of sensorimotor brain areas. After three training sessions, processing names of manipulated tools elicited a stronger ERD of the beta (18–25 Hz, 140–260 ms) and the lower mu rhythm (8–10 Hz, 320–440 ms) than processing names of visually explored tools, reflecting a possible reactivation of experiential sensorimotor information. Given the unexpected result that familiarized pseudo-words elicited an ERD comparable to names of manipulated tools, our findings could reflect a suppression of sensorimotor activity during the processing of objects with exclusively visual features.

The concreteness effect (CE) describes a processing advantage for concrete over abstract words. Electrophysiologically, the CE manifests in higher N400 and N700 amplitudes for concrete words. The contribution of the stimulus-inherent imageability to the electrophysiological correlates of the CE is not yet fully unraveled. This EEG study focused on the role of imageability irrespective of concreteness by examining the effects of training-induced visual imageability on the processing of novel words. In two training sessions, 21 healthy participants learned to associate novel words with pictures of novel objects as well as electron-microscopical structures and were additionally familiarized with novel words without any picture association. During a post-training EEG session, participants categorized trained novel words with or without picture association, together with real concrete and abstract words. Novel words associated with novel object pictures during the training elicited a higher N700 than familiarized novel words without picture-association. Crucially, this training-induced N700 effect resembled the CE found for real words. However, a CE on the N400 was found for real words, but no effect of imageability in novel words. The results suggest that the N400 CE for real words depends on the integration of multiple semantic features, while mere visual imageability might contribute to the CE in the N700 time window.

Embodied theories assign experience a crucial role in shaping conceptual representations. Supporting evidence comes mostly from studies on concrete concepts, where e.g., motor expertise facilitated action concept processing. This study examined experience-dependent effects on abstract concept processing. We asked participants with high and low mathematical expertise to perform a lexical decision task on mathematical and nonmathematical abstract words, while acquiring event-related potentials. Analyses revealed an interaction of expertise and word type on the amplitude of a fronto-central N400 and a centro-parietal late positive component (LPC). For mathematical words, we found a trend for a lower N400 and a significantly higher LPC amplitude in experts compared to nonexperts. No differences between groups were found for nonmathematical words. The results suggest that expertise affects the processing stages of semantic integration and memory retrieval specifically for expertise-related concepts. This study supports the generalization of experience-dependent conceptual processing mechanisms to the abstract domain.

For the selection of relevant information out of a continuous stream of information, which is a common definition of attention, two core mechanisms are assumed: a competition-based comparison of the neuronal activity in sensory areas and the top-down modulation of this competition by frontal executive control functions. Those control functions are thought to bias the processing of information towards the intended goals. Acute stress is thought to impair these frontal functions through the release of cortisol. In the present study, subjects had to detect a luminance change of a stimulus and ignore more salient but task irrelevant orientation changes. Before the execution of this task, subjects underwent a socially evaluated cold pressor test (SECPT) or a non-stressful control situation. The SECPT revealed reliable stress response with a significant increase of cortisol and alpha-amylase. Stressed subjects showed higher error rates than controls, particularly in conditions which require top-down control processing to bias the less salient target feature against the more salient and spatially separated distracter. By means of the EEG, subjects who got stressed showed a reduced allocation to the relevant luminance change apparent in a modulation of the N1pc. The following N2pc, which reflects a re-allocation of attentional resources, supports the error pattern. There was only an N2pc in conditions, which required to bias the less salient luminance change. Moreover, this N2pc was decreased as a consequence of the induced stress. These results allow the conclusion that acute stress impairs the intention-based attentional allocation and enhances the stimulus-driven selection, leading to a strong distractibility during attentional information selection.