A listener’s aesthetic engagement with a musical piece often reaches peaks in response to passages experienced as especially beautiful. The present study examined the extent which responses such self-identified beautiful (BPs), self-selected music, may be distinguishable terms of their affective qualities. In an online survey, participants indicated pieces they considered specific outstandingly...

OBJECTIVE The study investigated the influence Mozart's music has on brain activity in the process of learning. A second objective was to test priming explanation of the Mozart effect. METHODS In Experiment 1 individuals were first trained in how to solve spatial rotation tasks, and then solved similar tasks. Fifty-six students were divided into 4 groups: a control one--CG who prior to and af...

Music making has a number of beneficial effects for motor tasks compared to passive music listening. Given that recent research suggests that high energy musical activities elevate positive affect more strongly than low energy musical activities, we here investigated a recent method that combined music making with systematically increasing physiological arousal by exercise machine workout. We c...

The recognition of basic emotions in everyday communication involves interpretation of different visual and auditory clues. The ability to recognize emotions is not clearly determined as their presentation is usually very short (micro expressions), whereas the recognition itself does not have to be a conscious process. We assumed that the recognition from facial expressions is selected over the...

The present study investigated the effect of mood on self-paced study time. Twenty-eight university students voluntarily participated in the experiment. Half of them listened to positive music and the other half listened to negative music for nine minutes. After self-assessment of mood, they made self-paced study for word-pairs. The results showed that negative and positive mood have not signif...

(1) a. Yesterday at Paul’s party, Mary talked to a lot of people. They were usually nice. b. Yesterday at Paul’s party, Mary talked to a lot of people. For the most part, they were nice. (2) a. A lot of people listened to Mary’s new composition at the concert yesterday. #They were usually interested in serial music. b. A lot of people listened to Mary’s new composition at the concert yesterday....

At a wine tasting event with live classical music, we assessed whether participants would agree that certain wine and music pairings were congruent. We also assessed the effect of musical congruency on the wine tasting experience. The participants were given two wines to taste and two pieces of music-one chosen to match each wine-were performed live. Half of the participants tasted the wines wh...

We performed an experiment to investigate differences between deaf and hard of hearing people and hearing people when playing an audio-based game on a tablet computer, and how deaf and hard of hearing people appreciated the game when they played it with three different types of sound material— speech, music, or mixed speech and music. We analyzed game log files and participants’ self-assessment...

OBJECTIVES Interventions that reduce the magnitude of cardiovascular responses to stress are justified, at least in part, by the notion that exaggerated responses to stress can damage the cardiovascular system. Recent data suggest that it is worthwhile to explore, in addition to the magnitude of the cardiovascular responses during stress (reactivity), the factors that affect the return to basel...