Listening to music reduces eye movements

Listening to music can change the way that people visually experience the environment, probably as a result of an inwardly directed shift of attention. We investigated whether this attentional shift can be demonstrated by reduced eye movement activity, and if so, whether that reduction depends on absorption. Participants listened to their preferred music, to unknown neutral music, or to no music while viewing a visual stimulus (a picture or a film clip). Preference and absorption were significantly higher for the preferred music than for the unknown music. Participants exhibited longer fixations, fewer saccades, and more blinks when they listened to music than when they sat in silence. However, no differences emerged between the preferred music condition and the neutral music condition. Thus, music significantly reduces eye movement activity, but an attentional shift from the outer to the inner world (i.e., to the emotions and memories evoked by the music) emerged as only one potential explanation. Other explanations, such as a shift of attention from visual to auditory input, are discussed

'We all had an experience in there together':a discursive psychological analysis of collaborative paranormal accounts by paranormal investigation team members

This is a study of the verbal accounts of paranormal investigators. The focus of analysis is upon the rhetorical organization of event descriptions in ways that establish the factual status of reports in order to highlight the inherent problems associated with current understandings of reports of spontaneous cases. Drawing upon a corpus of interviews conducted with six investigation group members, analysis was conducted using discursive psychology, in particular the rhetorical approach, with an examination of the ways in which accounts were presented and the interactional consequences of describing events in particular ways. Analysis revealed how speakers worked to imply the paranormal status of events while avoiding explicitly labelling experiences as “paranormal.” By focussing upon the production of event descriptions, the construction of intersubjectivity and the importance of the context in which accounts are elicited, the current work has implications for the way in which parapsychologists currently utilize and understand accounts of spontaneous cases