Stereotypes and Personalities of Musicians

Folk fiddle players and Salvation Army brass band members completed the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI; H. J. Eysenck & S. B. G. Eysenck; 1964) and a questionnaire concerning their opinions about the personality characteristics of orchestral violinists, orchestral brass players, folk fiddlers, and Salvation Army brass band members. The EPI scores of the 2 groups showed a greater neuroticism among string players but not the greater extraversion of brass players found in previous studies on the personalities of musicians. Although participants' views about the personality characteristics of orchestral brass players and orchestral violinists echoed those found in previous research, their views on the Salvation Army (as brass players) and on folk fiddlers (as string players) did not. Results of this study showed that personality differences or stereotypes among musicians are probably determined more by the history and traditions of the group in which they are perceived to be involved than by the instruments they play.     

Hand Skill Asymmetry in Professional Musicians

Hand skill asymmetry on two handedness tasks was examined in consistent right-handed musicians and nonmusicians as well as mixed-handed and consistent left-handed nonmusicians. Musicians, although demonstrating right-hand superiority, revealed a lesser degree of hand skill asymmetry than consistent right-handed nonmusicians. Increased left-hand skill in musicians accounted for their reduced asymmetry. Musicians predominantly playing keyboard instruments demonstrated superior tapping performance than musicians playing predominantly string instruments, although they did not differ with respect to hand skill asymmetry. Since the diminished tapping asymmetry in musicians was related to early commencement but not duration of musical training, results are interpreted as an adaptation process due to performance requirements interacting with cerebral maturation during childhood.     

Handedness in Musicians: Bimanual Constraints on Performance

Handedness in musicians was examined in terms of the relative roles of the hands in bimanual motor activity involved in instrumental performance. Musicians playing instruments requiring temporally integrated (e.g., strings and woodwinds), as opposed to independent (e.g., keyboard instruments), bimanual motor activity were found to exhibit weaker degrees of handedness. There were no significant differences between groups in direction of handedness. Results are interpreted in terms of greater bilateral hemispheric integration and control of fine motor movements among subjects exhibiting mixed-handedness.     

Evaluation of a Mental Skills Training Program for Musicians

This study explored the effects of a 9-week music-specific mental skills training program delivered to students at a music conservatoire in England (n = 14). Pre- and post-testing involved a battery of questionnaires, public performances, and participant feedback. In comparison with a control group (n = 9), the experimental group demonstrated significant changes in their views toward practice activities and specific practicing behaviors, a significant increase in self-efficacy for performing, and an increase in imagery vividness. Comments from participants in the experimental group revealed greater levels of self-awareness, confidence, facilitative views toward and heightened control over anxiety, and healthier perspectives toward music-making.     

The Slow Creation of Humanity

The concept of “humanity”—the belief that “all humanity is one undivided and indivisible family”—has been created slowly in human consciousness since the fifteenth century. Humanity has found increasing expression in international law through the ending of slavery, the creation of “crimes against humanity,” and the advancement of human rights. This slow creation of humanity is described by reviewing the vital contributions of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Granville Sharp, Edmund Dene Morel, H. G. Wells, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Still, the creation of humanity is incomplete. The author's research on “identification with all humanity” is summarized. Finally, speculation is offered on the social and psychological foundations of identification with all humanity, on factors that undermine it, and on how it might be enlarged.     

Musicians processing music: Measurement of brain potentials with EEG

Abstract

In the present study, the EEG was recorded from the scalp of musicians while mentally active in their field. Analytic, creative and memory processes of the brain were observable using a special electrophysiological method called DC-potential recording. Music students listened to a sequence of four notes and subsequently were either to reverse the sequence (task 1 = analytic) or to compose a new continuation (task 2 = creative). In task 3, the initial segment of a well-known melody was presented and had to be continued (memory task). All tasks had to be solved mentally (imagery). In tasks 1 and 2, either tonal or atonal sequences were presented.

While processing, the results show that the analytic task elicited the highest brain activity. The analytic task involved mainly parieto-temporal areas of both hemispheres, the left hemisphere showing a tendency for domination. The memory task produced predominant activity over the right hemisphere. The creative task caused the lowest brain activation and elicited an unexpected lateralisation to the left, though we expected creativity to be a right hemispheric holistic-synthetic phenomenon.

Comparing listening with processing of the perceived music, we found a significant shift from an insignificant right hemispheric to an insignificant left hemispheric predominance (except with the memory task). This indicates that musicians do not lateralise to the left hemisphere per se when listening to music. Whether one finds a left hemispheric lateralisation in listening tasks or a right hemispheric one probably depends on the amount of simultaneous analytic-sequential processing the musician undertakes.     

Musicians experience less age-related decline in central auditory processing

Age-related decline in auditory perception reflects changes in the peripheral and central auditory systems. These age-related changes include a reduced ability to detect minute spectral and temporal details in an auditory signal, which contributes to a decreased ability to understand speech in noisy environments. Given that musical training in young adults has been shown to improve these auditory abilities, we investigated the possibility that musicians experience less age-related decline in auditory perception. To test this hypothesis we measured auditory processing abilities in lifelong musicians (N = 74) and nonmusicians (N = 89), aged between 18 and 91. Musicians demonstrated less age-related decline in some auditory tasks (i.e., gap detection and speech in noise), and had a lifelong advantage in others (i.e., mistuned harmonic detection). Importantly, the rate of age-related decline in hearing sensitivity, as measured by pure-tone thresholds, was similar between both groups, demonstrating that musicians experience less age-related decline in central auditory processing.     

The Dread of Mutual Creation of Meaning

Anthony Bass's and Ilana Laor's papers are viewed through the lens of the modern philosophical discussion regarding the ways meaning is created. A distinction is thus made, between “the setting” and the meaning of the setting, seeing the latter as inevitably created by the intersubjective dyad. The encounter with an Other, with whom we mutually create the meaning of our thoughts, feelings, and dreams, can be experienced as expanding the configurations of our selves and that of others, and thus, playfully or painfully, makes what was unbearable bearable, making all facets of oneself that could not live before come alive. But this very encounter also holds within it the dread of losing our own sense of self, of integrity and of sanity, and thus results in an impasse or “deadlock.” Because it touches the core of our being, as therapists and as human beings, the issue of “the frame and the picture,” of creating with our patients the meaning of the setting, amplifies this dialectic and is one of the most fascinating and difficult challenges of relational psychoanalysis.     

The Contingency of Creation and Modern Science

The Bible reveals a free, contingent act of the triune, personal God as the origin of the world. This paper explores the fruitfulness of taking the contingency of creation as the starting-point for our thinking about the natural world. We will see that the contingency of creation implies a conception of the natural order which is in harmony with modern science. It is the foundation for the experimental method and the use of mathematics, provides an understanding of contingent laws of nature, shows that natural order is open to historical evolution, and makes room for chance and novelty.     

God and The Possibility of Random Creation

In this paper I discuss a number of problems associated with the suggestion that it is possible for God to randomly select a possible world for actualization.

The protestant eruption into modern Brazilian politics

Brazil's fast‐growing Protestantism has contributed to a resacralisation of national politics in recent years. This is largely due to the politics practised by some of the large Pentecostal churches since 1986, using their corporate political power to strengthen internal leaderships and structure Brazil's huge popular Protestant field, as well as to gain resources for religious expansion and dispute space in civil religion. Corporate Protestant politics have been marked by corruption scandals and by politically motivated attempts to create representative organs capable of mediating the increasingly important relationship with the state. One new Pentecostal group (the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God) has established one of the largest media empires in the country and, in the 1994 elections, considerably augmented its political power and polarised the Protestant community with respect to its project of hegemony in the religious field. Thus, while Protestant politics can be considered generally positive for Brazilian democracy, the rise of such a politically powerful hegemonic force within the Protestant field gives a more sinister character to the ever‐present corporatist and triumphalist ambitions.     

The Creation of the Wabash Center Internet Guide

SUMMARY

This article describes the process through which the Wabash Center Guide to Internet resources in religion was conceived and developed. The resulting structure of the Guide is described, and comments are made concerning possible ways in which the Internet can contribute to the learning process in theology and religious studies. A vision for the future of this Guide or other similar efforts is also outlined.