emotion » The Thinking Meat Project

Links between musical scales and speech

Dec 042009

Music is surprisingly mysterious, for something so ubiquitous. For example, it’s not really clear why we generally associate major keys with happy moods and minor keys with more somber feelings. Also, we choose our scales somewhat arbitrarily out of a range of possibilities. Within a single octave, humans can discern about 240 different musical tones, but the ways we divide this complex tonal landscape are fairly uniform across not only western music but at least some other musical traditions, despite the multitude of other options.

A couple of papers from the lab of Dale Purves at Duke suggest that the answers to both questions are linked to the properties of human speech.

A paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America reports on research comparing the tonal qualities of excited and subdued speech and finds that the former contains more major intervals and the latter more minor intervals, which suggests a source for our identification of the emotional qualities of music in major and minor keys. Another paper in PLoS One shows that the musical intervals making up the most widely used scales are those that most closely resemble the harmonic structure of vowel sounds appearing in human speech.

These close links between the tonal qualities of music and speech suggest that one reason music is such a powerful influence on humans is that it uses whatever mental machinery evolved to pay attention to the utterances of other humans (or as the Purves lab web page puts it, “These findings are consistent with the idea that humans have a bias for conspecific vocalizations.”).

You can read an article from Science Daily about this work. The two papers are:

Major and Minor Music Compared to Excited and Subdued Speech, by D.L. Bowling, K. Gill, J.D. Choi, J. Prinz, D. Purves. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, December 2009.

A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales, by K. Gill and D. Purves.
PLoS One, 4(12): e8144. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008144, published December 3, 2009.

Negative subliminal messages more recognizable

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Sep 282009

Subliminal messages are presented so briefly that people do not register them consciously, but they can still influence emotions and perhaps behavior. New research indicates that subliminal messages are more easily registered if they involve negative emotions than if they are positive or neutral. If registering such a negative stimulus is linked to behavior, this might might make sense if you figure that a quick reaction to something bad heading our way is probably more essential than a quick reaction to something good. In the study, people were exposed very briefly to words that were emotionally positive, negative, or neutral, and then asked to identify whether the word was neutral or emotional. Even if they felt like they were just guessing, they made more correct identifications when they were shown negative words.

This press release on EurekAlert gives more information. It mentions possible applications in advertising and public service announcements. It’s not clear to me how effective subliminal advertising really is—that is, subliminal advertising in the strict sense of material presented too quickly to be consciously registered, as opposed to “hidden messages” in ice cubes in vodka ads and such. The latter could be manifestations of either crafty ad-makers or the human tendency to find patterns anywhere, in my opinion.

Why depression?

Psychology 1 Response »

Sep 222009

As anyone who has suffered from it knows, depression would seem to have few or no good points; the only reasonable approach seems to be to find a way to make it stop, the sooner the better. Indeed, depression exacts a terrible toll in terms of lost time, lost energy, and even lost lives.

So why do people get depressed? With such unpleasant or even dire consequences to this illness, why was it not eliminated by natural selection long ago? It’s not a disease of aging, like most cancers, so that can’t be it. As unlikely as it seems, depression may be best viewed as an adaptation that offers the benefit of uninterrupted, highly analytical cogitation about complex problems. This article from Scientific American explains how the symptoms of depression might fit this interpretation, and offers some evidence that prolonged, productive contemplation of one’s problems might in fact help depressed people gain insight into their problems and thus be better able to resolve them.

This idea is, frankly, a hard sell for me, because when I’m depressed, all I want is to feel better right now. However, I have encountered various books that suggest that depression sometimes has something to tell you, in roughly the same way that physical pain can alert you to a danger that you must address. As is almost always the case when I’m thinking about depression, I’m torn between the idea that depression is a sign that something is out of whack biochemically and needs to be set right, and the idea that it is a sign of emotional imbalance that needs to be explored and corrected. Both are probably true to differing degrees in different situations, so it’s worth looking into all the options available when you are depressed (medication, changes in diet and exercise, writing in a journal, counseling, and so on).

I’m also curious about the possible connection between depression and the typical diet in industrialized countries. I’ve been reading more about omega-3 fatty acids since I heard that talk last week about fats and the brain; the average American diet is seriously lacking in these necessary nutrients, which have been tentatively linked with depression. If depression is indeed an adaptation, I wonder if dietary deficiencies or other aspects of the way we live are inadvertently tripping the mechanism for this adaptation at times when it doesn’t actually do us any good. At any rate, it never hurts to nourish your brain well, both physically and emotionally.

When good things don’t register

Psychology 4 Responses »

Mar 222009

A recent experiment at Ohio State, described in this story from Science Daily, looked at how depressed and non-depressed people view positive and negative things in their environment. To examine how people form positive or negative attitudes, researchers used a computer game that neatly sidesteps any possible confusion from pre-existing attitudes about particular topics. The game introduces players to a variety of beans with different appearances. They can accept or reject each bean as it appears on the screen; some beans are good beans, adding points to a player’s score, while others are bad beans, resulting in points being lost. The goodness or badness of a bean is reliably indicated by its appearance, and players have to learn to identify beans based on their experience with the game.

In this particular experiment with the bean game, depressed and nondepressed people were equally good at identifying the bad beans. However, depressed people didn’t do as well as the non-depressed at identifying the good beans. This seems to me to present an interesting chicken-and-egg question: Are people slower to spot the good things because they are depressed, or are they depressed because they’re slower to spot the good things? (I suspect the answer might be “Yes”; i.e., both are true.) The Science Daily article seems to come down on the latter side; it concludes by suggesting that therapists who are treating depressed people might try to make them more aware of the good things in their lives. This is probably excellent advice, but I think there’s more to it than that.

It seems to me—based, I hasten to note, on nothing more than my own experiences with depression—that maybe the crucial missing piece in a depressed person’s experience of the game is that to a depressed person, good things don’t reliably feel good. The word “anhedonia” describes the lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable activities that forms, for me, the core experience of depression, and I think it may be what’s at work in the depressed people’s poorer performance in recognizing the good beans. They just don’t always feel whatever it is that identifies experiences as being positive, pleasurable, or worthwhile. Reminding myself of the many blessings in my life is always a good thing to do, but sometimes it seems like an intellectual exercise that doesn’t really do much to bring back the normal feeling of enjoying those blessings. I wish I knew better what it is that brings that feeling of enjoyment back, or makes it go away, but I’d bet that its absence is at the heart of the difference in performance on the bean game.

Another music-emotion connection

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Mar 052009

It appears that musical training will do more than enhance your understanding and perception of music. In a study at Northwestern, musicians were better than non-musicians at detecting emotion in the sound of a baby’s cry. An examination of brain activity revealed that musician’s brains appear to be better able to focus on the more complicated part of the sound, which conveys the emotional meaning, while giving less attention to the simpler, less emotion-laden part. This article from PhysOrg.com gives some details. (The article, by Dana Strait et al., will appear in the European Journal of Neuroscience.) I remember hearing a relatively young Joshua Bell play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with what seemed to me an emotional depth and richness beyond his years; I wonder if his years of musical training had anything to do with his sensitivity to emotional nuance.

Link between music, emotions, and memory

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Mar 032009

The next time a particularly memory-laden song from your teen years comes across your iPod playlist and you suddenly start remembering people and places from long ago, thank your medial pre-frontal cortex. A recent fMRI study at UC Davis indicates that this area links our autobiographical memories and our emotional response to the music associated with them. Because this area is one of the last to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, the findings could explain why people with Alzheimer’s still recognize and respond to music even after other memories are gone. This press release from EurekAlert gives an overview; the complete article is also available online, at least at the moment. (The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories, Petr Janata. Cerebral Cortex, Advance Access published online Feb. 24, 2009)

Songs that call up memories

Psychology 2 Responses »

Jan 252009

A friend recently sent me a link to a Pandora station he had created and thought I might like. That got me started exploring Pandora (an Internet music service based on the results of the Music Genome Project), in particular creating stations based on music I remember from my teen years (the 1970s) and twenties (the 1980s). Music is one of the strongest triggers I know for memories of a particular time and place; I enjoy not only recalling my own memories associated with a particular song, but hearing the stories that people close to me share about songs they remember. For example, when I hear Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good,” I flash back to when I was 17 and I bought my first car (a 1974 Gremlin; this was in 1978) and regularly drove home from my job at a bank through hot summer evenings in Phoenix with the windows down (the car was not air conditioned) and various pop songs playing on the radio (55 Phoenix, KOY).

However, I recalled all those details (and more), as well as some of the emotions of that time period, without listening to the song. A recent study examined whether there’s a difference in the strength of recall if people hear the song, see the title or lyrics, or see the album cover. The hypothesis was that hearing the song would lead to stronger recall, and that’s certainly what I would have expected. In fact, in a study of 124 undergrads who were prompted to recall songs from five different periods of their pasts, it didn’t matter that much how they were reminded of the song. The memories came back about as strongly for any of the experimental conditions, as long as the subjects were familiar with it and had autobiographical memories associated with it. This story from Science Daily gives an overview. The paper itself goes into a good bit more detail about autobiographical memory and the finer points of the study: Using music to cue autobiographical memories of different lifetime periods, Elizabeth T. Cady, Richard Jackson Harris, and J. Bret Knappenberger. Psychology of Music, Vol. 36, No. 2, 157-177 (April 2008)

The joys of nostalgia

Psychology 2 Responses »

Jan 082009

I have always been prone to nostalgia, even when you would have thought I was too young for it. It’s easy to regard this tendency as a character weakness; nostalgia gets bad press sometimes, being perceived as a sentimental waste of time, and it’s long been described as a psychological malady. However, a new paper surveys some recent research on the subject and recasts nostalgia as a psychological strength, a trick whereby we give our meat something to think about that makes us feel happier, more connected to others, and better about ourselves. This press release gives a brief overview, and the paper itself is, of course, much more interesting, if you can get your hands on it (Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future, by Constantine Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, Jamie Arndt, and Clay Routledge. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(5): 304-307)

One of the intriguing things I found in the paper is a comparison of people’s emotional reactions to recalling different kinds of experiences: positive, ordinary, nostalgic. Nostalgic experiences were unique in calling up both negative and positive emotions, but their net effect was likely to be a happy one. One study indicated that in nostalgic memories, even uncomfortable or unhappy events were often viewed side by side with happier ones, and this combination of the bitter and the sweet was perceived in terms of a redemption narrative that allowed loss or upset to be transmuted into something better.

It’s this ability to see the ebb and flow of experience as part of a bigger picture that may contribute to one of the benefits of nostalgia: a kinder view of one’s own self. The article itself quotes from another source to describe something that rang quite true for me:

Nostalgia has been theorized to bestow “an endearing luster” on the self and to cast “marginal, fugitive, and eccentric facets of earlier selves in a positive light”.

(The quotes are from Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: A sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press, pp. 41-46.)

To return again to the music-and-emotion theme, this reminded me of how I feel sometimes when listening to music that I’ve known for a long time, particularly the music of the Moody Blues, which means a great deal to me and has accompanied me through many of the events of my life since my early 20s. Somehow looking back at the memories evoked by the music (memories of times both good and bad, and certainly encompassing some eccentric facets of my earlier selves) blends the many aspects of my past into a story that, for all its dark spots, looks lovable to me (rather than filling me with angst over the mistakes I’ve made and the things I’ve lost).

The paper also mentions a couple of other benefits of nostalgia: the alleviation of loneliness (by letting us relive memories of beloved people and recall our bonds with them) and the existential dread of knowing that we must die someday (by supplying a shared sense of meaning). All in all, a very nice rehabilitation of a phenomenon once seen as an illness!

The paper closes with some thoughts on areas that might merit further exploration, in particular the possibly changing role of nostalgia over the lifespan, and the ways nostalgia might provide a thread linking past and present selves and thus contribute to our sense of identity.

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