Emotion Modulation through Music after Sadness Induction—The Iso Principle in a Controlled Experimental Study

Music therapy intervention manuals suggest that individuals who suffer from affective disorders benefit from listening to music according to the iso principle. The iso principle comprises listening to music that matches the current mood of patients at first, and then to gradually shift to music that represents a desired mood. Within the current study, we investigate whether the sequence of music with different emotional valence can modulate the emotional state. All participants were healthy adults who underwent a sadness induction via a movie clip. They were subsequently divided into four experimental groups. Each was asked to listen to two pieces of music according to a specific sequence: sad-sad; sad-happy; happy-happy; happy-sad. Participants were prompt to rate their current emotional state at different stages of the experiment: prior to and after the movie clip, as well as after each of the two pieces of music. The frame used for the assessment was the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and the Self-Assessment Manikin. The results indicate that the movie clip induced sadness. The group of participants who listened to the sad music first and the happy music afterwards ultimately reported a higher positive affect, a higher emotional valence, and a lower negative affect compared with the other groups. However, not all the between-group differences reached significance. We conclude that the sequence of music with different emotional valence affects the current emotional state. The results are generally in line with the iso principle. Directions for future research are presented.

Genetic influences on brain representations of natural audiovisual experiences

Natural sensory inputs in everyday situations induce unique experiences that vary between individuals, even when inputs are identical. This experiential uniqueness stems from the representations of sensory signals in each brain. We investigated whether genetic factors control individual differences in sensory representations in the brain by studying the brain representations of natural audiovisual signals in twin-pairs. We measured the brain response to natural movies in twins using functional magnetic resonance imaging and quantified the genetic influence on the multivoxel-pattern similarity of movie clip representations between each twin. The whole-brain analysis revealed a genetic influence on the multivoxel-pattern similarity in widespread brain regions, which included the occipitotemporal sensory cortices as well as the frontoparietal association cortices and subcortical structures. Our findings suggest that genetic factors exhibit an effect on natural audiovisual signaling by controlling audiovisual representations in the brain.

Using Rich Narratives to Engage Students in Worthwhile Mathematics: Children’s Literature, Movies and Short Films

Using children’s literature to support mathematics instruction has been connected to positive academic outcomes and learning dispositions; however, less is known about the use of audiovisual based narrative mediums to support student mathematical learning experiences. The current exploratory, qualitative study involved teaching three lessons based on challenging, problem solving tasks to two classes of Australian Year (Grade) 5 students (10 and 11 year olds). These tasks were developed from various narratives, each portrayed through a different medium (movie clip, short film, picture story book). Post lesson interviews were undertaken with 24 students inviting them to compare and contrast this lesson sequence with their usual mathematics instruction. Drawing on a self-determination theory lens, our analysis revealed that these lessons were experienced by students as both highly enjoyable and mathematically challenging. More specifically, it was found that presenting mathematics tasks based on rich and familiar contexts and providing meaningful choices about how to approach their mathematical work supported student autonomy. In addition, there was evidence that the narrative presentation supported student understanding of the mathematics through making the tasks clearer and more accessible, whilst the audiovisual mediums (movie clip, short film) in particular provided a dynamic representation of key mathematical ideas (e.g., transformation and scale). Students indicated an eclectic range of preferences in terms of their preferred narrative mediums for exploring mathematical ideas. Our findings support the conclusion that educators and researchers focused on the benefits of teaching mathematics through picture story books consider extending their definition of narrative to encompass other mediums, such as movie clips and short films.

Genetic influences on brain representations of natural audiovisual experiences

Natural sensory inputs in everyday situations induce unique experiences that vary between individuals, even when inputs are identical. This experiential uniqueness stems from the representations of sensory signals in each brain. We investigated whether genetic factors control individual differences in sensory representations in the brain by studying the brain representations of natural audiovisual signals in twin-pairs. We measured the brain response to natural movies in twins using functional magnetic resonance imaging and quantified the genetic influence on the multivoxel-pattern similarity of movie clip representations between each twin. The whole-brain analysis revealed a genetic influence on the multivoxel-pattern similarity in widespread brain regions, which included the occipitotemporal sensory cortices as well as the frontoparietal association cortices and subcortical structures. Our findings suggest that genetic factors exhibit an effect on natural audiovisual signaling by controlling audiovisual representations in the brain.

Dynamic and stable brain connectivity during movie watching as revealed by functional MRI

Spatially remote brain regions show synchronized activity as typically revealed by correlated functional MRI (fMRI) signals. An emerging line of research has focused on the temporal fluctuations of connectivity, however, its relationships with stable connectivity have not been clearly illustrated. We examined the stable and dynamic connectivity from fMRI data when the participants watched four different movie clips. Using inter-individual correlation, we were able to estimate functionally meaningful dynamic connectivity associated with different movies. Widespread consistent dynamic connectivity was observed for each movie clip as well as their differences between clips. A cartoon movie clip showed higher consistent dynamic connectivity with the posterior cingulate cortex and supramarginal gyrus, while a court drama clip showed higher dynamic connectivity with the auditory cortex and temporoparietal junction, which suggest the involvement of specific brain processing for different movie contents. In contrast, stable connectivity was highly similar among the movie clips, and showed fewer statistical significant differences. The patterns of dynamic connectivity had higher accuracy for classifications of different movie clips than the stable connectivity and regional activity. These results support the functional significance of dynamic connectivity in reflecting functional brain changes, which could provide more functionally related information than stable connectivity.

Teaching Recording and Sampling with Audio Projects

This chapter presents a first set of project plans, which deal mainly with the mechanics of working with recorded sound, with basic editing techniques, and with the concept of the multitrack timeline. As projects progress, they introduce successively more complex techniques. The projects include making a song from pre-existing audio clips, making a radio advertisement, creating a simple remix using acapella tracks, analyzing a professional multitrack recording, creating custom cover songs, and using a variety of editing techniques to create a fully formed soundtrack for a movie clip. The chapter also discusses the specific affordances of Ableton Live for arranging and performing audio clips, compares the traditionally linear Arrangement View with the innovative nonlinear Session View, and explains rationales for using each one depending on musical context.

Anticipation of temporally structured events in the brain

Learning about temporal structure is adaptive because it enables the generation of expectations. We examined how the brain uses experience in structured environments to anticipate upcoming events. During fMRI, individuals watched a 90-second movie clip six times. Using a Hidden Markov Model applied to searchlights across the whole brain, we identified temporal shifts between activity patterns evoked by the first vs. repeated viewings of the movie clip. In many regions throughout the cortex, neural activity patterns for repeated viewings shifted to precede those of initial viewing by up to 15 seconds. This anticipation varied hierarchically in a posterior (less anticipation) to anterior (more anticipation) fashion. We also identified specific regions in which the timing of the brain's event boundaries were related to those of human-labeled event boundaries, with the timing of this relationship shifting on repeated viewings. With repeated viewing, the brain's event boundaries came to precede human-annotated boundaries by 1-4 seconds on average. Together, these results demonstrate a hierarchy of anticipatory signals in the human brain and link them to subjective experiences of events.

Pain(less) cleansing: Watching other people in pain reduces guilt and sadness but not shame

Past research has shown that pain experience reduces feelings of guilt for earlier wrongdoings. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether watching other people in pain can reduce feelings of guilt. In Study 1 (N = 60), we found that participants’ levels of guilt and sadness decreased after they watched a one-minute movie clip showing a painful medical procedure. Study 2 (N = 156), eliminated an alternative explanation in which pain observation but not the misattribution of unrelated excitation reduced guilt. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 60), pain observation lowered participants’ feelings of guilt but not their feelings of shame. Overall, these results suggest that the guilt-reducing effect of pain may appear even without the actual experience of physical pain.

Two hours in Hollywood: A manually annotated ground truth data set of eye movements during movie clip watching

In this short article we present our manual annotation of the eye movement events in a subset of the large-scale eye tracking data set Hollywood2. Our labels include fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuits, as well as a noise event type (the latter representing either blinks, loss of tracking, or physically implausible signals). In order to achieve more consistent annotations, the gaze samples were labelled by a novice rater based on rudimentary algorithmic suggestions, and subsequently corrected by an expert rater. Overall, we annotated eye movement events in the recordings corresponding to 50 randomly selected test set clips and 6 training set clips from Hollywood2, which were viewed by 16 observers and amount to a total of approximately 130 minutes of gaze data. In these labels, 62.4% of the samples were attributed to fixations, 9.1% – to saccades, and, notably, 24.2% – to pursuit (the remainder marked as noise). After evaluation of 15 published eye movement classification algorithms on our newly collected annotated data set, we found that the most recent algorithms perform very well on average, and even reach human-level labelling quality for fixations and saccades, but all have a much larger room for improvement when it comes to smooth pursuit classification. The data set is made available at https://gin.g- node.org/ioannis.agtzidis/hollywood2_em.