Feelings,direction of attention,and expressed evaluations of others

Abstract

Noting the occasional inconsistency in the results of studies of the effects of negative affect on thoughts and actions in social situations, it is suggested that: (1) self-regulatory mechanisms sometimes intervene to determine what people experiencing unpleasant feeling will say (and maybe think) about others around them; and (2) at least some of these mechanisms may have to be activated by relatively high-level cognitive processing and are not always operative. More specifically. the theoretical analysis presented here holds that many different kinds of negative affect will prime thoughts having a negative meaning, including unfavourable judgements of others. However, negative affect does not always lead to openly expressed negative opinions and actions. It is proposed that attention to one's moderately unpleasant feelings tends to moderate the effect of negative affect on subsequent negative thoughts and actions by activating “higher-level” cognitive processing so that consideration is given to different kinds of knowledge pertinent to the given situation, including the social rules defining what is desirable and whatever relevant information is provided in the situation. Two experiments are reported, employing greatly different procedures and subjects of both sexes. in support of this analysis. The seeming disparity between the present conception and self-awareness theory is also discussed. and it is noted that these formulations are actually not at odds. Suggestions are made for further research.     

Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants

Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower-level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 45 sleeping infants (2.0- to 11.9-weeks-old) while they listened to monophonic instrumental lullabies and infant-directed speech produced by a mother. To match acoustic variation between music and speech sounds we (1) recorded music from instruments that had a similar spectral range as female infant-directed speech, (2) used a novel excitation-matching algorithm to match the cochleagrams of music and speech stimuli, and (3) synthesized “model-matched” stimuli that were matched in spectrotemporal modulation statistics to (yet perceptually distinct from) music or speech. Of the 36 infants we collected usable data from, 19 had significant activations to sounds overall compared to scanner noise. From these infants, we observed a set of voxels in non-primary auditory cortex (NPAC) but not in Heschl's Gyrus that responded significantly more to music than to each of the other three stimulus types (but not significantly more strongly than to the background scanner noise). In contrast, our planned analyses did not reveal voxels in NPAC that responded more to speech than to model-matched speech, although other unplanned analyses did. These preliminary findings suggest that music selectivity arises within the first month of life. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/c8IGFvzxudk .

Research Highlights

• Responses to music, speech, and control sounds matched for the spectrotemporal modulation-statistics of each sound were measured from 2- to 11-week-old sleeping infants using fMRI.
• Auditory cortex was significantly activated by these stimuli in 19 out of 36 sleeping infants.
• Selective responses to music compared to the three other stimulus classes were found in non-primary auditory cortex but not in nearby Heschl's Gyrus.
• Selective responses to speech were not observed in planned analyses but were observed in unplanned, exploratory analyses.