NEURAL DYNAMICS OF MUSIC THERAPY FOR ADDICTION: EMOTIONS, CRAVINGS AND STATE-DEPENDENT RECALL

Filippo Pasqualitto, PhD student at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research, Anglia Ruskin University, presents his research on the neuroscience of music therapy for addiction treatment. He demonstrates this with a video of brain data recorded using EEG hyperscanning – which allows the simultaneous recording of brain activity from two people interacting – to unravel features of the therapeutic process.

Although preliminary evidence suggests beneficial effects of music therapy for addiction, to date, there are no experiments monitoring the ongoing neural dynamics of music therapy for substance abuse clients and the impact of this therapeutic approach on long-term outcomes. In this talk, Filippo Pasqualitto, PhD Student at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research, Anglia Ruskin University, presents the aims of his research and show a video of brain data recorded with EEG Hyperscanning - allowing the simultaneous recording of brain activity from two people interacting - to unravel features of the therapeutic process.

After completing a Bachelors degree in Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome (2017) Filippo Pasqualitto got a Masters degree in Cognitive Neuroscience from the same institution (2019). During this period, he was awarded a scholarship to carry out his master thesis at Liverpool Hope University. In 2020 Filippo completed a post-lauream internship in Neurobiology at Sapienza, working on addiction vulnerability/resilience in the animal model. Today, his PhD project aims to investigate the ongoing neural dynamics of music therapy for addiction and the impact of this therapeutic approach on the short-term and long-term outcomes such as depressive, anxiety and craving symptoms.