So happy to share this work, feel free to check it out!
www.frontiersin.org/journals/neu...

• Emotional incongruency engaged increased activations in the frontoparietal network, suggesting higher cognitive effort 🔍
• Together, these findings provide new insights into the neural and behavioral dynamics of audiovisual emotional integration in art perception.🎧🧠

• The interaction effect between congruency and semantics led to stronger activation in the ventral visual stream and emotion-related regions, indicating more detailed visual processing while controlling for low-level features like color and brightness.🔗⚡

• Semantic content (meaning in the paintings) further boosted the effect of emotional congruency ✨
• Congruency engaged a broad network of brain regions involved in auditory/visual sensory processing, emotion-related areas, and cognitive regions. 🧠🌟

🧠🎨 In this paper, we explore how emotional (in)congruency shapes aesthetic experience by using fMRI and behavioral measures with naturalistic art stimuli.

Key findings:

• Emotionally congruent music and paintings (e.g., happy + happy) led to higher beauty ratingsl 🎼🖼️

Huge thanks to my wonderful supervisors for their endless support: Rob van Lier, Tessa van Leeuwen, Yağmur Güçlütürk, PhD Umut Güçlü.

Through it all, persistence paid off; we kept going despite challenges and distance.

We began this project in the Netherlands when I was a post-bachelor. It paused during the pandemic in Turkey, continued through my master’s in Germany & France, and finally completed during my PhD back in the Netherlands.