The impact of politeness and relationship on perceived quality of advice about a problem

Advice is a common but potentially problematic way to respond to someone who is distressed. Politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) suggests advice threatens a hearer's face and predicts that the speaker‐hearer relationship and the use of politeness strategies can mitigate face threat and enhance the effectiveness of advice messages. Students (N=384) read 1 of 16 hypothetical situations that varied in speaker power and closeness of the speaker‐hearer relationship. Students then read 1 of 48 advice messages representing different politeness strategies and rated the message for regard shown for face and for effectiveness. However, neither speaker‐hearer relationship nor politeness strategies was consistently associated with perceived threat to face or perceived advice effectiveness. We suggest revisions to politeness theory and additional factors that may affect judgments of face sensitivity and advice effectiveness.     

Retrieval dynamics in recognition and list discrimination: Further evidence of separate processes of familiarity and recall

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the time course of retrieval from memory is different for familiarity and recall. The response-signal method was used to compare memory retrieval dynamics in yes-no recognition memory, as a measure of familiarity, with those of list discrimination, as a measure of contextual recall. Responses were always made with regard to membership in two previous study lists. In Experiment 1 an exclusion task requiring positive responses to words from one list and negative responses to new words and words from the nontarget list was used. In Experiment 2, recognition and list discrimination were separate tasks. Retrieval curves from both experiments were consistent, showing that the minimal retrieval time for recognition was about 100 msec faster than that for list discrimination. Repetition affected asymptotic performance but had no reliable effects on retrieval dynamics in either the recognition or the list-discrimination task.     

Characterizing the musical phenotype in individuals with Williams Syndrome.

Williams Syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder, is characterized by peaks and valleys in mental function: substantial impairments in cognitive domains such as reasoning, arithmetic ability, and spatial cognition, alongside relatively preserved skills in social domains, face processing, language, and music. We report the results of a comprehensive survey on musical behaviors and background administered to the largest sample of individuals with WS to date (n = 118, mean age = 20.4), and compare the results to those obtained from a control group of typically developing normal individuals (n = 118, mean age = 20.9) and two groups of individuals with other neurodevelopmental genetic disorders, Autism (n = 30, mean age = 18.2) and Down Syndrome (n = 40, mean age = 17.2). Individuals with WS were found to be rated higher in musical accomplishment, engagement, and interest than either of the comparison groups, and equivalent on most measures to the control group. Compared to all other groups including the controls, the WS individuals displayed greater emotional responses to music, manifested interest in music at an earlier age, and spent more hours per week listening to music. In addition, the effects of music listening (whether positive or negative) tended to last longer in the WS group. A factor analysis extracted seven principal components that characterize the musical phenotype in our sample, and discriminant function analysis of those factors was able to successfully predict group membership for the majority of cases. We discuss the neurobiological implications of these findings.     

Cross-modal interactions in the experience of musical performances: physiological correlates

This experiment was conducted to investigate cross-modal interactions in the emotional experience of music listeners. Previous research showed that visual information present in a musical performance is rich in expressive content, and moderates the subjective emotional experience of a participant listening and/or observing musical stimuli [Vines, B. W., Krumhansl, C. L., Wanderley, M. M., & Levitin, D. J. (2006). Cross-modal interactions in the perception of musical performance. Cognition, 101, 80--113.]. The goal of this follow-up experiment was to replicate this cross-modal interaction by investigating the objective, physiological aspect of emotional response to music measuring electrodermal activity. The scaled average of electrodermal amplitude for visual-auditory presentation was found to be significantly higher than the sum of the reactions when the music was presented in visual only (VO) and auditory only (AO) conditions, suggesting the presence of an emergent property created by bimodal interaction. Functional data analysis revealed that electrodermal activity generally followed the same contour across modalities of presentation, except during rests (silent parts of the performance) when the visual information took on particular salience. Finally, electrodermal activity and subjective tension judgments were found to be most highly correlated in the audio-visual (AV) condition than in the unimodal conditions. The present study provides converging evidence for the importance of seeing musical performances, and preliminary evidence for the utility of electrodermal activity as an objective measure in studies of continuous music-elicited emotions.     

Fluency misattribution and auditory hindsight bias

We conducted three experiments to test the fluency-misattribution account of auditory hindsight bias. According to this account, prior exposure to a clearly presented auditory stimulus produces fluent (improved) processing of a distorted version of that stimulus, which results in participants mistakenly rating that item as easy to identify. In all experiments, participants in an exposure phase heard clearly spoken words zero, one, three, or six times. In the test phase, we examined auditory hindsight bias by manipulating whether participants heard a clear version of a target word just prior to hearing the distorted version of that word. Participants then estimated the ability of naïve peers to identify the distorted word. Auditory hindsight bias and the number of priming presentations during the exposure phase interacted underadditively in their prediction of participants’ estimates: When no clear version of the target word appeared prior to the distorted version of that word in the test phase, participants identified target words more often the more frequently they heard the clear word in the exposure phase. Conversely, hearing a clear version of the target word at test produced similar estimates, regardless of the number of times participants heard clear versions of those words during the exposure phase. As per Roberts and Sternberg’s (Attention and Performance XIV, pp. 611–653, 1993) additive factors logic, this finding suggests that both auditory hindsight bias and repetition priming contribute to a common process, which we propose involves a misattribution of processing fluency. We conclude that misattribution of fluency accounts for auditory hindsight bias.     

Music to my eyes: cross-modal interactions in the perception of emotions in musical performance

We investigate non-verbal communication through expressive body movement and musical sound, to reveal higher cognitive processes involved in the integration of emotion from multiple sensory modalities. Participants heard, saw, or both heard and saw recordings of a Stravinsky solo clarinet piece, performed with three distinct expressive styles: restrained, standard, and exaggerated intention. Participants used a 5-point Likert scale to rate each performance on 19 different emotional qualities. The data analysis revealed that variations in expressive intention had their greatest impact when the performances could be seen; the ratings from participants who could only hear the performances were the same across the three expressive styles. Evidence was also found for an interaction effect leading to an emergent property, intensity of positive emotion, when participants both heard and saw the musical performances. An exploratory factor analysis revealed orthogonal dimensions for positive and negative emotions, which may account for the subjective experience that many listeners report of having multi-valent or complex reactions to music, such as “bittersweet.”     

The structure of musical preferences: a five-factor model

Music is a cross-cultural universal, a ubiquitous activity found in every known human culture. Individuals demonstrate manifestly different preferences in music, and yet relatively little is known about the underlying structure of those preferences. Here, we introduce a model of musical preferences based on listeners' affective reactions to excerpts of music from a wide variety of musical genres. The findings from 3 independent studies converged to suggest that there exists a latent 5-factor structure underlying music preferences that is genre free and reflects primarily emotional/affective responses to music. We have interpreted and labeled these factors as (a) a Mellow factor comprising smooth and relaxing styles; (b) an Unpretentious factor comprising a variety of different styles of sincere and rootsy music such as is often found in country and singer-songwriter genres; (c) a Sophisticated factor that includes classical, operatic, world, and jazz; (d) an Intense factor defined by loud, forceful, and energetic music; and (e) a Contemporary factor defined largely by rhythmic and percussive music, such as is found in rap, funk, and acid jazz. The findings from a fourth study suggest that preferences for the MUSIC factors are affected by both the social and the auditory characteristics of the music.     

Perception of emotional expression in musical performance

Expression in musical performance is largely communicated by the manner in which a piece is played; interpretive aspects that supplement the written score. In piano performance, timing and amplitude are the principal parameters the performer can vary. We examined the way in which such variation serves to communicate emotion by manipulating timing and amplitude in performances of classical piano pieces. Over three experiments, listeners rated the emotional expressivity of performances and their manipulated versions. In Experiments 1 and 2, timing and amplitude information were covaried; judgments were monotonically decreasing with performance variability, demonstrating that the rank ordering of acoustical manipulations was captured by participants' responses. Further, participants' judgments formed an S-shaped (sigmoidal) function in which greater sensitivity was seen for musical manipulations in the middle of the range than at the extremes. In Experiment 3, timing and amplitude were manipulated independently; timing variation was found to provide more expressive information than did amplitude. Across all three experiments, listeners demonstrated sensitivity to the expressive cues we manipulated, with sensitivity increasing as a function of musical experience.     

Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies

Evidence for the absolute nature of long-term auditory memory is provided by analyzing the production of familiar melodies. Additionally, a two-component theory of absolute pitch is presented, in which this rare ability is conceived as consisting of a more common ability,pitch memory, and a separate, less common ability,pitch labeling. Forty-six subjects sang two different popular songs, and their productions were compared with the actual pitches used in recordings of those songs. Forty percent of the subjects sang the correct pitch on at least one trial; 12% of the subjects hit the correct pitch on both trials, and 44% came within two semitones of the correct pitch on both trials. The results show a convergence with previous studies on the stability of auditory imagery and latent absolute pitch ability; the results further suggest that individuals might possess representations of pitch that are more stable and accurate than previously recognized.     

Cross-modal interactions in the perception of musical performance

We investigate the dynamics of sensory integration for perceiving musical performance, a complex natural behavior. Thirty musically trained participants saw, heard, or both saw and heard, performances by two clarinetists. All participants used a sliding potentiometer to make continuous judgments of tension (a measure correlated with emotional response) and continuous judgments of phrasing (a measure correlated with perceived musical structure) as performances were presented. The data analysis sought to reveal relations between the sensory modalities (vision and audition) and to quantify the effect of seeing the performances on participants' overall subjective experience of the music. In addition to traditional statistics, functional data analysis techniques were employed to analyze time-varying aspects of the data. The auditory and visual channels were found to convey similar experiences of phrasing but different experiences of tension through much of the performances. We found that visual information served both to augment and to reduce the experience of tension at different points in the musical piece (as revealed by functional linear modeling and functional significance testing). In addition, the musicians' movements served to extend the sense of phrasing, to cue the beginning of new phrases, to indicate musical interpretation, and to anticipate changes in emotional content. Evidence for an interaction effect suggests that there may exist an emergent quality when musical performances are both seen and heard. The investigation augments knowledge of human communicative processes spanning language and music, and involving multiple modalities of emotion and information transfer.