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Science Interview with Humintell’s Director – Dr. Matsumoto Part 2

Below is the continuation of the interview with Dr. Matsumoto  about his current research on Triumph vs. Pride by science reporter, Anna Meldolesi, for her Italian Newspaper, Il Corriere della sera:

Q2:  What about defeat behavior in athletes and primates?

Dr. Matsumoto:  Our papers show the behaviors of the defeated to include head down, arms brought to the side or front, eyes gazing down, face covers. These behaviors are consistent with the emotion of sadness and/or shame.

Q3:  Can you comment on behavior and expressions of elite athletes before competition? Think of Usain Bolt for example. Are they kidding or threatening competitors?

Dr. Matsumoto:  Can’t really comment as we have never studied it formally. Anecdotally I think each athlete is different in their optimal “game face.” While there are the Usain Bolt’s of the world, there are other athletes who do very different things yet perform extremely well. It would be a good study.

 Q4:  Marco Balotelli is a talented and eccentric football player often criticized by the media and targeted by racist remarks in Italy.  After scoring twice in a very important match this year, he  took his t-shirt off and posed like Hulk in the middle of the field.  Can you please comment that expression [Below]?

Dr. Matsumoto:  It’s different than what we study because we examine the initial, automatic, and probably unconscious reaction to the win. The expressions you have here occur seconds later where the person is posing and voluntarily expressing behaviors. All in all they all serve to enhance the dominance and success of the person, but these are all unique because they happen after the initial reactions and are voluntarily driven.

Q5:  What can you say about these two photographs [below]?

                                               

Why We’re Happy About Being Sad: The Emotions Behind Pop Music

© Francois Etienne Du Plessis | Dreamstime.com

A recent fascinating NPR article highlighted the research of Glenn Schellenberg of the University of Toronto, where he studies the psychology of music.

The idea behind Schellenberg’s initial experiment was pretty straightforward: he simply wanted to play music for people and get them to rate how happy or sad that music made them feel.

Through music, the emotions of happiness and sadness are relatively easy to identify.  Schellenberg says the tempo of a song and whether it’s in a major or minor key often strongly influences which emotion the song conveys.

“Happy-sounding songs typically tend to be in a major key, and they tend to be fast, [with] more beats per minute,” he says. “Conversely, sad-sounding songs tend to be slow in tempo, and they also tend to be in a minor key.”

The grad student had no trouble finding fast, happy-sounding music in a major key when he looked at older musical eras — from the classical period up through the 1960s — but it got a lot harder when it came to contemporary pop music.

Had there been some kind of shift, Schellenberg wondered, in the emotional content of music since the 1960s? How had the psychology of our music changed?

To find the answer, Schellenberg did a totally different study. He analyzed more than 1,000 songs — every Top 40 hit from 1965 to 2009 — in terms of tempo and whether the song was in a major or minor key.

His findings? “All [Top 40 songs] published by Billboard [in 1965], every single one was a major-key song,” Schellenberg says. But through the 1980s and ’90s, the dominance of the major key in the Top 40 began to shift, slowly at first and then quite radically: “By 2009,” Schellenberg says, “only 18 out of [the Top] 40 [songs] were a major key.”

As an example, take a look at the music video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to Schellenberg’s study, in the latter half of the last decade, there were more than twice as many hit songs in a minor key as there were in the latter half of the 1960s.

“People are responding positively to music that has these characteristics that are associated with negative emotions,” he says.

As an example, take a look at the music video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The question, of course, is why? Why would consumers connect more to conflict and sadness now than they did in the ’60s and ’70s?

Schellenberg says he doesn’t think it’s because people today are any sadder.

“I think that people like to think that they’re smart,” he says. “And unambiguously happy-sounding music has become, over time, to sound more like a cliche. If you think of children’s music like ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ or ‘The Wheels on the Bus,’ those are all fast and major, and so there’s a sense in which unambiguously happy-sounding songs sound childish to contemporary ears. I think there’s a sense in which something that sounds purely happy, in particular, has a connotation of naivete.”

If you use a minor key, though, you can make even something with a positive message and fast tempo sound emotionally complicated.

“It’s more emotionally complex in the sense that it’s expressing both sadness in terms of one dimension and happiness in terms of another dimension at the same time,” Schellenberg says.

That complexity makes both listeners and composers feel sophisticated instead of naive. In that way, Schellenberg says, the emotion of unambiguous happiness is less socially acceptable than it used to be. It’s too Brady Bunch, not enough Modern Family.

“People have come to appreciate sadness and ambiguity more,” Schellenberg says. “Life is more complicated, and they want the things that they consume as pleasure to be complex similarly.”

To hear the complete NPR interview, please click on the link below:

All things considered-Why we’re happy being sad: Pop’s emotional evolution

Research, Lies and More Research: The Myth of the Dead Giveaway

Photo courtesy of CHAD ZUBER/SHUTTERSTOCK via Pacific Standard Magazine

By now, many of us have realized that the average person, yes that’s you and me, is not very good at detecting deception BUT very proficient at implementing it.

This fact has been proven time and time again by research that purports we are only as accurate as chance (50%) when it comes to correctly catching lies.

Pacific Standard Magazine has reported on the deception myths that some law enforcement officers fall prey to such as, if a suspect is fidgeting, touching their nose, stroking their head etc.

Much research finds this mindset is counter productive and notes that it even lowers the accuracy of judgments.  Why are the above concepts inaccurate?

Simply because people react differently under stressful situations.

What juries, law enforcement, and media need to understand is that accusing someone of a wrong doing is Very stressful and even frightening (for the innocent as well as the guilty) and convicting them because they don’t react to tragedy or the loss of a loved one as others want them to or expect, affects not only them but their families and the effects are irreversible (even if they are later found innocent and released).

Overestimating one’s ability to recognize when someone is not being truthful might not make much of a difference for us on a daily basis.  However, when criminal investigators do it, it can have dire consequences.

David Taylor, a homicide detective and veteran law enforcement trainer points out some important facts,  “Everyone responds to traumatic situations completely differently.  Given death notifications, some people will ball up in a corner and cry their guts out. Some will sit there in complete disbelief, or become argumentative. How would you be, accused of a crime? And how the person accuses you is going to impact your reaction.”

In a related article also by Pacific Standard mag the lie myths from above, which were popularized by the T.V.  show Lie To Me (cancelled) are put under scrutiny.  Timothy Levine, a professor of communication at Michigan State University reported that  “Lie to Me appears to increase skepticism at the cost of accuracy.” 

In past post, Humintell reports, “While the TV show is loosely based on Dr. Paul Ekman’s work in the field of microexpressions, it must be remembered that Lie to Me is a television drama series where plot lines are fabricated, characters are fictional and the truth is often exaggerated.”

Levine’s study, published in the journal Communication Research, finds watching the drama increases suspicion of others even as it reduces one’s ability to detect deception.  Levine and his colleagues experiment involved 108 undergraduates at the university.  To find out more about Levine and his study read Humitnell’s past blog,  Lie to Me: Viewers Impact.

 How do you weigh in on this information ?  
Do you think you are better than average at Detecting Deception?