Noticeable
Up speeds you down. Awe-evoking monumental buildings trigger behavioral and perceived freezing
Yannick Joye & Siegfried Dewitte
Journal of Environmental Psychology, September 2016, Pages 112-125
Abstract:
Since the dawn of large-scale civilizations, humans have built exceptionally tall architectural structures. We tested whether exposing individuals to images of very tall buildings would produce feelings of awe in them, and would lead to a behavioral response frequently associated with this emotion, namely "freezing". Across four studies participants reported to feel more awestruck (Pilot 1a, Study 1a) and more bodily immobile after having seen pictures of high versus low buildings (Study 1b). In addition to perceived immobility, we also found that participants responded slower on a manual clicking task in the face of high as opposed to low buildings (Pilot 1b, Study 1b). This effect was mediated by perceived bodily immobility, suggesting that slow clicking after seeing high buildings indeed reflected behavioral freezing. Overall, our findings suggest that very tall buildings can be a trigger of awe, and that experiencing this emotion can involve a state of behavioral freezing.
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From Painkiller to Empathy Killer: Acetaminophen (Paracetamol) Reduces Empathy for Pain
Dominik Mischkowski, Jennifer Crocker & Baldwin Way
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Simulation theories of empathy hypothesize that empathizing with others' pain shares some overlapping psychological computations with the processing of one's own pain. Support for this perspective has largely relied on functional neuroimaging evidence of an overlap between activations during the experience of physical pain and empathy for other people's pain. Here, we extend the functional overlap perspective to the neurochemical level and test whether a common physical painkiller, acetaminophen (paracetamol), can reduce empathy for another's pain. In two double-blind placebo-controlled experiments, participants rated perceived pain, personal distress, and empathic concern in response to reading physical or social pain scenarios, witnessing ostracism in the lab, or visualizing another study participant receiving painful noise blasts. As hypothesized, acetaminophen reduced empathy in response to others' pain. Acetaminophen also reduced the unpleasantness of noise blasts delivered to the participant, which mediated acetaminophen's effects on empathy. Together, these findings suggest that the physical painkiller acetaminophen reduces empathy for pain and provide a new perspective on the neurochemical bases of empathy. Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of US adults each week.
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Sex Differences in Music: A Female Advantage at Recognizing Familiar Melodies
Scott Miles, Robbin Miranda & Michael Ullman
Frontiers in Psychology, March 2016
Abstract:
Although sex differences have been observed in various cognitive domains, there has been little work examining sex differences in the cognition of music. We tested the prediction that women would be better than men at recognizing familiar melodies, since memories of specific melodies are likely to be learned (at least in part) by declarative memory, which shows female advantages. Participants were 24 men and 24 women, with half musicians and half non-musicians in each group. The two groups were matched on age, education, and various measures of musical training. Participants were presented with well-known and novel melodies, and were asked to indicate their recognition of familiar melodies as rapidly as possible. The women were significantly faster than the men in responding, with a large effect size. The female advantage held across musicians and non-musicians, and across melodies with and without commonly associated lyrics, as evidenced by an absence of interactions between sex and these factors. Additionally, the results did not seem to be explained by sex differences in response biases, or in basic motor processes as tested in a control task. Though caution is warranted given that this is the first study to examine sex differences in familiar melody recognition, the results are consistent with the hypothesis motivating our prediction, namely that declarative memory underlies knowledge about music (particularly about familiar melodies), and that the female advantage at declarative memory may thus lead to female advantages in music cognition (particularly at familiar melody recognition). Additionally, the findings argue against the view that female advantages at tasks involving verbal (or verbalizable) material are due solely to a sex difference specific to the verbal domain. Further, the results may help explain previously reported cognitive commonalities between music and language: since declarative memory also underlies language, such commonalities may be partly due to a common dependence on this memory system. More generally, because declarative memory is well studied at many levels, evidence that music cognition depends on this system may lead to a powerful research program generating a wide range of novel predictions for the neurocognition of music, potentially advancing the field.
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Shlomo Hareli et al.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Preference for round over sharp shaped objects, is attributed to the potential damage of sharpness. We tested if leaf sharpness of vegetation surrounding a house, affects the evaluation the house and its owner. We demonstrated that houses surrounded by sharp leaf vegetation (SLV) were evaluated as more expensive than houses surrounded by round leaf vegetation (RLV). Among the SLV surrounded houses, those surrounded only by palms were rated highest while SLV houses were evaluated as safer. In a final experiment, the perceptions of individual leaves differing in shape, were consistent with the protective function of sharp leaves. Our findings are explained by theorizing that SLV confer protective value on neighboring houses. The perceived higher values and safety of houses surrounded by palms is attributed to the association of palms with suitable and stable living environments. Furthermore, preference for palm habitats may have deep roots of human evolution in African savannas.
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Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Terry McGuire & Patricia Wilson
PLoS ONE, May 2016
Abstract:
Mood odor identification, explicit awareness of mood odor, may be an important emotion skill and part of a complex dual processing system. It has already been shown that mood odors have significant implicit effects, effects that occur without awareness. This study applies methods for examining human individual differences in the identification of chemosignals for fear and happy, important in itself, and a key to understanding the dual processing of emotion in the olfactory system. Axillary mood odors had been collected from 14 male donors during a mood induction task. Pads were collected after 12 and 24 minutes, creating two doses. Sixty -one participants (41 females) identified the mood odor chemosignals. On a single trial, participants identified 2 doses of fear, 2 doses of happy, and a sterile control. There were 15 trials. The first analysis (rtt) showed that the population was phenotypically heterogeneous, not homogeneous, in identification accuracy. It also showed that a minimum of 10 trials was needed for test reliability. The second analysis, Growth Mixture Modeling, found three distinct groups of detectors: (1) 49.49% were consistently accurate super detectors, (2) 32.52% were accurate above chance level detectors, and (3) 17.98% were non-detectors. Bayesian Posterior Analyses showed reliability of groups at or above 98%. No differences related to mood odor valence (fear or happy), dose (collection at 12 or 24 minutes) or gender were found. Implications for further study of genetic differences, learning and function of identification are noted. It appears that many people can be reliable in explicitly identifying fear and happy mood odors but this skill is not homogeneous.
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The Song Is You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality
David Greenberg et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that musical preferences are linked to personality, but this research has been hindered by genre-based theories and methods. We address this limitation using a novel method based on the actual attributes that people perceive from music. In Study 1, using 102 musical pieces representing 26 genres and subgenres, we show that 38 perceived attributes in music can be organized into three basic dimensions: arousal, valence, and depth. In Study 2 (N = 9,454), we show that people's preferences for these musical attributes reflected their self-ratings of personality traits. Importantly, personality was found to predict musical preferences above and beyond demographic variables. These findings advance previous theory and research and have direct applications for the music industry, recommendation algorithms, and health-care professionals.
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A Simple Task Uncovers a Postdictive Illusion of Choice
Adam Bear & Paul Bloom
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do people know when, or whether, they have made a conscious choice? Here, we explore the possibility that choices can seem to occur before they are actually made. In two studies, participants were asked to quickly choose from a set of options before a randomly selected option was made salient. Even when they believed that they had made their decision prior to this event, participants were significantly more likely than chance to report choosing the salient option when this option was made salient soon after the perceived time of choice. Thus, without participants' awareness, a seemingly later event influenced choices that were experienced as occurring at an earlier time. These findings suggest that, like certain low-level perceptual experiences, the experience of choice is susceptible to "postdictive" influence and that people may systematically overestimate the role that consciousness plays in their chosen behavior.
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Feeling light or dark? Emotions affect perception of brightness
Xiaobin Zhang et al.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, September 2016, Pages 107-111
Abstract:
In three experiments, we tested whether a perceiver's emotions affected the perception of brightness. Experiment 1 primed emotions via happy or sad film clips and found that happy participants judged the room to be brighter than sad participants. In Experiment 2, participants' emotions were primed by recalling happy or sad deeds and also revealed that happy participants judged the room to be brighter in both watts and using a 7-point scale compared to sad participants. Using the same manipulation as Experiment 2, Experiment 3 also showed that happy participants judged a gray picture presented on a computer screen (i.e., the room) to be brighter than sad participants. These experiments provide evidence that perceivers' emotions can affect the perception of brightness in a metaphorically consistent manner.
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The Insula Mediates Access to Awareness of Visual Stimuli Presented Synchronously to the Heartbeat
Roy Salomon et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 4 May 2016, Pages 5115-5127
Abstract:
The processing of interoceptive signals in the insular cortex is thought to underlie self-awareness. However, the influence of interoception on visual awareness and the role of the insular cortex in this process remain unclear. Here, we show in a series of experiments that the relative timing of visual stimuli with respect to the heartbeat modulates visual awareness. We used two masking techniques and show that conscious access for visual stimuli synchronous to participants' heartbeat is suppressed compared with the same stimuli presented asynchronously to their heartbeat. Two independent brain imaging experiments using high-resolution fMRI revealed that the insular cortex was sensitive to both visible and invisible cardio-visual stimulation, showing reduced activation for visual stimuli presented synchronously to the heartbeat. Our results show that interoceptive insular processing affects visual awareness, demonstrating the role of the insula in integrating interoceptive and exteroceptive signals and in the processing of conscious signals beyond self-awareness.
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Amy Rose Price et al.
Journal of Neuroscience, 30 March 2016, Pages 3829-3838
Abstract:
A defining aspect of human cognition is the ability to integrate conceptual information into complex semantic combinations. For example, we can comprehend "plaid" and "jacket" as individual concepts, but we can also effortlessly combine these concepts to form the semantic representation of "plaid jacket." Many neuroanatomic models of semantic memory propose that heteromodal cortical hubs integrate distributed semantic features into coherent representations. However, little work has specifically examined these proposed integrative mechanisms and the causal role of these regions in semantic integration. Here, we test the hypothesis that the angular gyrus (AG) is critical for integrating semantic information by applying high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to an fMRI-guided region-of-interest in the left AG. We found that anodal stimulation to the left AG modulated semantic integration but had no effect on a letter-string control task. Specifically, anodal stimulation to the left AG resulted in faster comprehension of semantically meaningful combinations like "tiny radish" relative to non-meaningful combinations, such as "fast blueberry," when compared to the effects observed during sham stimulation and stimulation to a right-hemisphere control brain region. Moreover, the size of the effect from brain stimulation correlated with the degree of semantic coherence between the word pairs. These findings demonstrate that the left AG plays a causal role in the integration of lexical-semantic information, and that high-definition tDCS to an associative cortical hub can selectively modulate integrative processes in semantic memory.