Shared Neural Responses and Individualised Emotional Experience: An fMRI Study of Music Listening and Anhedonia

Anhedonia, the diminished capacity to experience pleasure, is a core symptom of depressive disorders and is linked to altered reward, salience, and affective processing. However, whether individual differences in anhedonia are associated with variance in neural responses during naturalistic emotional experiences remains unclear. This study examined neural synchrony, subjective emotional similarity, and continuous anhedonia-related variation in 28 healthy young adults who listened to emotionally evocative classical music during fMRI. Participants listened to happy, sad, and neutral excerpts while providing continuous emotional ratings. Inter-subject correlation (ISC) analyses quantified voxelwise neural synchrony across the brain and within affective and reward-related regions of interest (ROIs). Continuous inter-subject representational similarity analysis (IS-RSA) tested whether pairwise neural synchrony varied with anhedonic depression symptoms, measured using the Mood and Anxiety Symptoms Questionnaire (MASQ-AD). Robust ISC was observed during music listening, particularly in bilateral auditory cortices (Heschls gyrus) and sensorimotor regions. Pairwise neural synchrony showed limited correspondence with similarity in continuous emotional subjective ratings, with significant associations primarily observed in auditory and somatosensory regions rather than classical affective regions. Anhedonia IS-RSA showed no reliable associations between MASQ-AD scores and pairwise neural synchrony across targeted affective and reward-related ROIs. These findings suggest that shared neural responses during music listening are strongest in perceptual and sensorimotor systems, whereas subjective emotional similarity and anhedonia-related variation showed limited correspondence with neural synchrony. This pattern highlights the value of continuous, naturalistic approaches for distinguishing shared stimulus-locked processing from more variable components of emotional experience.