Comprehension of affective prosody in women with post-traumatic stress disorder related to childhood abuse.

OBJECTIVE: Although deficits in memory and cognitive processing are evident in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), difficulties with social cognition and the impact of such difficulties on interpersonal functioning are poorly understood. Here, we examined the ability of women diagnosed with PTSD related to childhood abuse to discriminate affective prosody, a central component of social cognition. METHOD: Women with PTSD and healthy controls (HCs) completed two computer-based tasks assessing affective prosody: (i) recognition (categorizing foreign-language excerpts as angry, fearful, sad, or happy) and (ii) discrimination (identifying whether two excerpts played consecutively had the 'same' or 'different' emotion). The association of performance with symptom presentation, trauma history, and interpersonal functioning was also explored. RESULTS: Women with PTSD were slower than HCs at identifying happiness, sadness, and fear, but not anger in the speech excerpts. The presence of dissociative symptoms was related to reduced accuracy on the discrimination task. An increased severity of childhood trauma was associated with reduced accuracy on the discrimination task and with slower identification of emotional prosody. CONCLUSION: Exposure to childhood trauma is associated with long-term, atypical development in the interpretation of prosodic cues in speech. The findings have implications for the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

Arousal, mood, and the Mozart effect.

The "Mozart effect" refers to claims that people perform better on tests of spatial abilities after listening to music composed by Mozart. We examined whether the Mozart effect is a consequence of between-condition differences in arousal and mood. Participants completed a test of spatial abilities after listening to music or sitting in silence. The music was a Mozart sonata (a pleasant and energetic piece) for some participants and an Albinoni adagio (a slow, sad piece) for others. We also measured enjoyment, arousal, and mood. Performance on tbe spatial task was better following the music than the silence condition but only for participants who heard Mozart. The two music selections also induced differential responding on the enjoyment, arousal and mood measures. Moreover, when such differences were held constant by statistical means, the Mozart effect disappeared. These findings provide compelling evidence that the Mozart effect is an artifact of arousal and mood.

Music and nonmusical abilities.

Reports that exposure to music causes benefits in nonmusical domains have received widespread attention in the mainstream media. Such reports have also influenced public policy. The so-called "Mozart effect" actually refers to two relatively distinct phenomena. One concerns short-term increases in spatial abilities that are said to occur from listening to music composed by Mozart. The other refers to the possibility that formal training in music yields nonmusical benefits. A review of the relevant findings indicates that the short-term effect is small and unreliable. Moreover, when it is evident, it can be explained by between-condition differences in the listener's mood or levels of cognitive arousal. By contrast, the effect of music lessons on nonmusical aspects of cognitive development is still an open question. Several studies have reported positive associations between formal music lessons and abilities in nonmusical (e.g., linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains. Nonetheless, compelling evidence for a causal link remains elusive.

Culture-general and culture-specific factors in the discrimination of melodies.

We examined effects of a culture-general factor, pattern redundancy (number of repeated tones), on the discrimination of 5-tone melodies that differed in their adherence to Western tonal conventions. Experiment 1 evaluated the ability of 9-month-old infants to differentiate "standard" melodies from subtly altered "comparison" melodies. Greater redundancy of the standard melodies was associated with enhanced infant performance, but musical conventionality had no effect. Experiment 2 evaluated comparable abilities in 5-year-old children and musically untrained adults. Children's performance was enhanced by the redundancy of standard melodies, but the effect was greater in conventional than in unconventional contexts. The redundancy of standard melodies facilitated adults' performance in conventional but not in unconventional contexts. Thus, increasing musical exposure seems to attenuate the effects of culture-general factors such as pattern redundancy while amplifying the influence of culture-specific factors.

Infants' and adults' perception of scale structure.

Adults and 9-month-old infants were required to detect mistuned tones in multitone sequences. When 7-tone versions of a common nursery tune were generated from the Western major scale (unequal scale steps) or from an alternative scale (equal steps), infants detected the mistuned tones more accurately in the unequal-step context than in the equal-step context (Experiment 1). Infants and adults were subsequently tested with 1 of 3 ascending-descending scales (15 tones): (a) a potentially familiar scale (major) with unequal steps, (b) an unfamiliar scale with unequal steps, and (c) an unfamiliar scale with equal steps. Infants detected mistuned tones only in the scales with unequal steps (Experiment 2). Adults performed better on the familiar (major) unequal-step scale and equally poorly on both unfamiliar scales (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings are indicative of an inherent processing bias favoring unequal-step scales.

Name that tune: identifying popular recordings from brief excerpts.

We tested listeners' ability to identify brief excerpts from popular recordings. Listeners were required to match 200- or 100-msec excerpts with the song titles and artists. Performance was well above chance levels for 200-msec excerpts and poorer but still better than chance for 100-msec excerpts. Performance fell to chance levels when dynamic (time-varying) information was disrupted by playing the 100-msec excerpts backward and when high-frequency information was omitted from the 100-msec excerpts; performance was unaffected by the removal of low-frequency information. In sum, successful identification required the presence of dynamic, high-frequency spectral information.

A left-ear advantage for forced-choice judgements of melodic contour.

Listeners heard a sequence of five tones presented monaurally, and then made a forced-choice judgement about the sequence's contour (i.e., its pattern of upward and downward shifts in pitch between successive tones). The forced-choice method ensured that contoured judgements were independent of absolute-pitch an interval cues. Performance was better for sequences presented to the left ear (right hemisphere) than it was for sequences presented to the right ear (left hemisphere). This finding provides support for claims of a right-hemisphere bias for the processing of melodic contour.

Sensory consonance and the perceptual similarity of complex-tone harmonic intervals: tests of adult and infant listeners.

Two experiments examined the influence of sensory consonance on the perceptual similarity of simultaneous pairs of complex tones (harmonic intervals). In experiment 1, adults heard a sequence of five consonant intervals (each a perfect fifth, or 7 semitones) and judged whether a subsequently presented test interval was a member of the sequence. Discrimination performance was better when the test interval was dissonant (tritone, 6 semitones) rather than consonant (perfect fourth, 5 semitones), despite the fact that the change in interval width was twice as great for the consonant than for the dissonant comparison. In experiment 2, 7-month-old infants were tested with an operant headturn procedure in a similar design and exhibited an identical pattern of responding. Hence, for both age groups, consonance was more important than interval width in determining the perceived similarity of harmonic intervals.

Expectancy in melody: tests of the implication-realization model.

The implication-realization model's description of tone-to-tone expectancies for continuations of melodies was examined. The model's predictions for expectancies are described with a small number of principles specified precisely in terms of interval size and direction of pitch. These principles were quantified and used to predict the data from three experiments in which listeners were required to judge how well individual test tones continued melodic fragments. The model successfully predicted listeners' judgments across different musical styles (British and Chinese folk songs and Webern Lieder), regardless of the extent of listeners' musical training (Experiments 1 and 2) or whether they were born and raised in China or the U.S.A. (Experiment 3). For each experiment, however, the collinearity of the model's predictors indicated that a simplified version of the model might predict the data equally well. Indeed, a revised and simplified model did not result in a loss of predictive power for any of the three experiments. Convergent evidence was provided in a reanalysis of data reported by Carlsen (1981) and Unyk and Carlsen (1987), whose listeners were required to sing continuations to two-tone stimuli. Thus, these findings indicate that the implication-realization model is over-specified. The consistency that was found across experimental tasks, musical styles, and listeners raises the possibility, however, that the revised version of the model may withstand the original model's claims of universality.

Frequency ratios and the discrimination of pure tone sequences.

We examined the effect of frequency ratios on the discrimination of patterns of alternating pure tones (ABABA). Listeners heard a repeating pattern presented in transposition (same frequency ratios between successive tones, different absolute frequencies) and were required to indicate when the pattern changed (different frequency ratios and absolute frequencies). Changes from patterns with simple frequency ratios to those with more complex ratios were more readily detected than were changes from complex ratios to simpler ratios.

Frequency ratios and the perception of tone patterns.

We quantified the relative simplicity of frequency ratios and reanalyzed data from several studies on the perception of simultaneous and sequential tones. Simplicity of frequency ratios accounted for judgments of consonance and dissonance and for judgments of similarity across a wide range of tasks and listeners. It also accounted for the relative ease of discriminating tone patterns by musically experienced and inexperienced listeners. These findings confirm the generality of previous suggestions of perceptual processing advantages for pairs of tones related by simple frequency ratios.