Musicianship Enhances Perception But Not Feeling of Emotion From Others’ Social Interaction Through Speech Prosody

Music expertise has been shown to enhance emotion recognition from speech prosody. Yet, it is currently unclear whether music training enhances the recognition of emotions through other communicative modalities such as vision and whether it enhances the feeling of such emotions. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with visual, auditory, and audiovisual clips consisting of the biological motion and speech prosody of two agents interacting. Participants judged as quickly as possible whether the expressed emotion was happiness or anger, and subsequently indicated whether they also felt the emotion they had perceived. Measures of accuracy and reaction time were collected from the emotion recognition judgements, while yes/no responses were collected as indication of felt emotions. Musicians were more accurate than nonmusicians at recognizing emotion in the auditory-only condition, but not in the visual-only or audiovisual conditions. Although music training enhanced recognition of emotion through sound, it did not affect the felt emotion. These findings indicate that emotional processing in music and language may use overlapping but also divergent resources, or that some aspects of emotional processing are less responsive to music training than others. Hence music training may be an effective rehabilitative device for interpreting others’ emotion through speech

Reaching Into Response Selection: Stimulus and Response Similarity Influence Central Operations

To behave adaptively in complex and dynamic environments, one must link perception and action to satisfy internal states, a process known as response selection (RS). A largely unexplored topic in the study of RS is how interstimulus and interresponse similarity affect performance. To examine this issue, we manipulated stimulus similarity by using colors that were either similar or dissimilar and manipulated response similarity by having participants move a mouse cursor to locations that were either close together or far apart. Stimulus and response similarity produced an interaction such that the mouse trajectory showed the greatest curvature when both were similar, a result obtained under task conditions emphasizing speed and conditions emphasizing accuracy. These findings are inconsistent with symbolic look-up accounts of RS but are consistent with central codes incorporating metrical properties of both stimuli and responses

Realizing General Education: Reconsidering Conceptions and Renewing Practice

General Education is widely touted as an enduring distinctive of higher education in the United States (Association of American Colleges and Universities, [11]; Boyer, [37]; Gaston, [86]; Zakaria, [202]). The notion that undergraduate education demands wide‐ranging knowledge is a hallmark of U.S. college graduates that international educators emulate (Blumenstyk, [25]; Rhodes, [158]; Tsui, [181]). The veracity of this distinct educational vision is supported by the fact that approximately one third of the typically 120 credits required for the bachelor\u27s degree in the United States consist of general education courses (Lattuca & Stark, [120]). Realizing a general education has been understood to be central to achieving higher education\u27s larger purposes, making it a particularly salient concern

Avoidance responding as a function of stimulus duration and relation to free shock

Response-independent pairings of a tone and a brief shock were superimposed on uncued avoidance responding in four groups of rhesus monkeys. For one group, tone presentations were immediately followed by an unavoidable electric shock; for the remaining groups, gaps of 5, 20, and 80 sec intervened between tone termination and shock delivery. These temporal values subsume paradigms usually treated as discrete procedures; the conditioned emotional response procedure (0-sec gap between tone and shock), trace procedure (5-sec gap) and safety-signal training (80-sec gap). Within each group, tone durations of 10, 20, 40, and 80 sec were examined. A response pattern marked by maximum response rate in the initial 5 sec of the tone followed by deceleration before shock was observed when shock immediately followed the tone, but not when gaps were interposed between the tone and shock. Response rates in the first 5 sec of the tone were a function of both tone duration and duration of the gap. When the gap was 0 to 5 sec, initial response rates were highest in longer duration tones; this relationship between tone duration and initial tone response rate was not observed for longer gaps

Uninstructed human responding: Sensitivity of low-rate performance to schedule contingencies

College students' presses on a telegraph key occasionally turned on a light in the presence of which button presses produced points later exchangeable for money. Initially, responding was maintained by low-rate contingencies superimposed on either random-interval or random-ratio schedules. Later, the low-rate contingencies were relaxed. Low-rate key pressing had been established for some students by shaping and for others by demonstration and written instructions. After the low-rate contingencies were relaxed, higher response rates generally did not increase point earnings with random-interval scheduling, but did so with random-ratio scheduling. In both cases, shaped responding usually increased, and instructed responding usually continued at an unchanged low rate. The insensitivity of instructed responding typically occurred despite contact with the contingencies. The differential sensitivity to schedule contingencies of shaped responding relative to instructed responding is consistent with the different properties of contingency-governed and rule-governed behavior and is not rate-dependent