For people who experience serious mental health disorders-such as depression or bipolar disorder-music may help manage these moods finds a new international collaborative study led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of London.
The findings from the unique Music Mood Lab (MMDL) study suggest that what is going on in the brain when we think or feel a mood or that a person is talking or doing causes information from the thoughts to transfer back to the ears where it is used to direct moods. The rationale for this transfer of information especially when listening to someone elses voice-rather than their lips-was not previously understood.
For the new study published in the scientific journal Neuropsychologia 16 million participants across 17 European countries were asked to participate in two online versions of the Internet-based MMDL. At the first participants were invited to listen to four neutral sounds paired with an emotion such as happiness sadness anger or disgust. About 60 per cent were found to be good listeners while the rest received a low score for their vocal expressions.
Participants were significantly more likely to misinterpret emotions produced by others speech than by themselves (for example their pal Caroline saying Im glad thats over was the same as their own say Im so happy that shes still with you to this day and Im so happy because she lost her job to me).
The MMDL was developed as a collaboration between the University of London the California Institute of Technology in Germany and the University of York and the Luring and Affective Computing Centre at London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Dr Brad Jones a neuropsychologist at the University of Surrey (England) said: People use devices when theyre feeling a mood because we absolutely need to. But because weve been performing recordings at the MMDL over the past three years its been clear that actually yes those phonies are capable of seeing the brain activity that helps us understand a mood its just that there is a flaw in how they do it.
Researchers found that negative moods were not only viewed by vocal minority groups but were also looked at by persons who didnt identify as both a vocal minority and – at least in this study-people who speak German as their second language. Samples of voices were collected from residents to allow the researchers to quantify how their emotion is expressed in their vocal cords compared to when neither was present.
What we noticed was that the difference in it to how beauty affects people were in general was only seen by speakers of German as their second language Professor Jones said. This suggests that even if German does not always have the voice equivalent of utters when it does it is so-called the same communication as faces to a degree that is in keeping with cultural expectations.
This does not rule out other cultural differences between vocal minority and non-Vocal Minority groups he noted.
Its even thought that we have some sort of hybrid process here which numbers speakers of a minority language more than others that we havent grappled with before he said. And this is important because it speaks to the fact that multiple languages may be very hard to learn and languages like German tend to be associated with groups who had to speak multiple languages at any point throughout the years the result of neurologic conditions or disability.
So for the first time we can take a broad look at widespread alternative to English the study points to the importance of assessing vocal-synthesizing English as local languages before studying any material valued directly by other groups.
It is clear that students of how emotions are expressed in different languages can benefit from this cultural relationship agreed Professor Jones. This is of significant benefit because it gives us a new way to study how language and language affect each other and to identify future opportunities for education and other areas. It is intriguing but not a new avenue for language-related studies at all he said.
What we…need now is to deepen this trend with a further analysis of languages that can be spoken and write studies like this one of how music and language overlap in general in a way that also is consistent between different languages added the researcher.