Children's perception of certain musical properties: scale and contour

Children's perception of scale and contour in melodies was investigated in five studies. Experimental tasks included judging transposed renditions of melodies (Studies 1 and 3), discriminating between transposed renditions of a melody (Study 2), judging contour-preserving transformations of melodies (Study 4), and judging similarity to a familiar target melody of transformations preserving rhythm or rhythm and contour (Study 5). The first and second studies showed that young children detect key transposition changes even in familiar melodies and they perceive similarity over key transpositions even in unfamiliar melodies. Young children also are sensitive to melodic contour over transformations that preserve it (Study 5), yet they distinguish spontaneously between melodies with the same contour and different intervals (Study 4). The key distance effect reported in the literature did not occur in the tasks of this investigation (Studies 1 and 3), and it may be apparent only for melodies shorter or more impoverished than those used here.     

Drinking and Driving: Perceptions and Evaluations as a Function of Level of Intoxication and Weather

Over the past decade, drinking and driving has been a major social problem causing deaths and injuries. The present study examined factors that may encourage this potentially self-destructive behavior. Three hundred and seventy-eight subjects were presented with scenarios describing a night of drinking with friends. Scenarios differed with respect to three levels of intoxication (not at all, slight, and very) and two levels of weather (clear and rain). Subjects were asked to estimate the proportion of their peers who would drive home or choose an alternative form of transportation. Subjects were also asked to evaluate the target who drove home or took an alternative in terms of likability, cautiousness, skillfulness and independence. Driving home was found to be the most common mode of transportation, regardless of state of drunkenness or weather conditions. Alternatives to driving home were seen as being utilized only under extreme conditions (e.g., very intoxicated and rainy weather). Moreover, persons taking one of the more cautious alternatives were perceived as overly cautious and also low in skillfulness. The practical implications for the findings are discussed with respect to enhancing education efforts.     

Heat and Violence: New Findings from Dallas Field Data, 1980–19811

Research in both laboratory and field settings has suggested a link between thermal stress and violent behavior, and both linear and curvilinear models have been investigated. A dearth of field studies prompted the analysis reported here, which is based on data for some 10,000 aggravated assaults occurring the City of Dallas in 1980 (a summer of severe heat stress) and 1981. This analysis replicates and extends certain aspects of recent work by Anderson and Anderson (1984) relating to the so-called linear and curvilinear hypotheses. Thermal stress is measured in two ways: a Discomfort Index (DI), which takes into account the influence of humidity acting in concert with temperature, and ambient temperature. Regression analyses were performed in two stages. In the first, data for all neighborhoods and all days of the study period were combined into ambient temperature and DI models. At the second stage, models differentiated between the three levels of neighborhood socioeconomic status. With weekend controlled, DI and ambient temperature were significant independent variables in the ‘overall’ model and in medium and low status neighborhoods. However, when linear effects were controlled, the curvilinear measures were never significant. The analysis generally tended to confirm Anderson and Anderson's suggestion that a reduction of aggression with increasing temperature does not appear to occur within the normal range of temperatures. This analysis further suggested that the hypothesized curvilinear effect is weak, if not entirely absent, even during conditions of extreme heat.