Manuela M Marin

University of Vienna | UniWien

Although politicians, top managers, or informal leaders like influencers have millions of followers, they are mostly known through photographs or videos. Especially in photographs, it is important to make a leader-like impression-both figuratively and physically. However, the role of camera angles on impression formation of leaders has not been stu...

A number of theories about the origins of musicality have incorporated biological and social perspectives. Darwin argued that musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice. Darwin did not regard musicality as a sexually dimorphic trait, paralleling evidence that both sexes produce and enjo...

For centuries, Western philosophers have argued that aesthetic experiences differ from common, everyday pleasing sensations, and further, that mental states, such as disinterested contemplation and aesthetic distance, underlie these complex experiences. We empirically tested whether basic perceptual processes of information intake reveal evidence f...

Daniel Berlyne and his New Experimental Aesthetics have largely shaped the field since the 1970s by putting the study of collative variables related to stimulus features in the foreground, embedded in the context of motivation, arousal, and reward. Researchers from various fields have extensively studied the role of novelty, surprise, complexity, a...

When an observer perceives and judges two persons next to each other, different types of social cues simultaneously arise from both perceived faces. Using a controlled stimulus set depicting this scenario (with two persons identified respectively as “target face” and “looking face”), we explored how emotional expressions, gaze, and head direction o...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Humans are uniquely characterized by having a complex language and the ability to speak. Studying the cognitive foundations of language is one of the most challenging endeavors in linguistics and related fields as it spans a wide range of research disciplines which all contribute to our understanding of language. The goal of this volume is to prese...

Human music, like language, is a cultural universal whose origins remain elusive. Some individuals have a congenital impairment in music processing and singing, which might be biologically rooted. Congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder, has been studied for around 15 years by only a few research groups worldwide. Although amusia was origi...

Humans are uniquely characterized by having a complex language and the ability to speak. Studying the cognitive foundations of language is one of the most challenging endeavors in linguistics and related fields as it spans a wide range of research disciplines which all contribute to our understanding of language. The goal of this volume is to prese...

Empirical studies testing Berlyne's (1971) psychobiological model have led to conflicting results, and individual differences have been proposed as a possible explanation. We explored whether top-down influences related to personality may play a role and studied how affect-related personality traits are related to complexity and arousal responses....

Several theories about the origins of music have emphasized its biological and social functions, including in courtship. Music may act as a courtship display due to its capacity to vary in complexity and emotional content. Support for music’s reproductive function comes from the recent finding that only women in the fertile phase of the reproductiv...

Spearman’s rank order correlations between average attractiveness ratings and age, mood, and musical background variables for three groups of participants. (PDF)

Data file containing experimental data and background variables of individual participants. (XLSX)

Spearman’s rank order correlations between average dating desirability ratings and age, mood, and musical background variables for three groups of participants. (PDF)

A NUMBER OF PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL MEASURES indexing autonomic and somatovisceral activation to music have been proposed in line with the wider emotion literature. However, attempts to replicate experimental findings and provide converging evidence for music-evoked emotions through physiological changes, overt expression, and subjective measures have...

In his seminal book on esthetics, Berlyne (1971) posited an inverted-U relationship between complexity and hedonic tone in arts appreciation, however, converging evidence for his theory is still missing. The disregard of the multidimensionality of complexity may explain some of the divergent results. Here, we argue that definitions of hedonic tone...

Pupillary responses are a well-known indicator of emotional arousal but have not yet been systematically investigated in response to music. Here, we measured pupillary dilations evoked by short musical excerpts normalized for intensity and selected for their stylistic uniformity. Thirty participants (15 females) provided subjective ratings of music...

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired pitch processing. Although pitch simultaneities are among the fundamental building blocks of Western tonal music, affective responses to simultaneities such as isolated dyads varying in consonance/dissonance or chords varying in major/minor quality have rarely been studied...

Since its dawn in the early 2000s, neuroaesthetics has been flowering as an independent research field (Nadal and Skov, 2013). Its emergence has mostly been driven by researchers who specialize in the study of visual perception and cognition, and who show interest in visual arts. This strong link between neuroaesthetics and vision science is reflec...

Thompson, W. F., Marin, M. M., & Stewart, L. (2012). Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 109(49), 19027-19032.

Being "in flow" or "in the zone" is defined as an extremely focused state of consciousness which occurs during intense engagement in an activity. In general, flow has been linked to peak performances (high achievement) and feelings of intense pleasure and happiness. However, empirical research on flow in music performance is scarce, although it may...

Emotions in music are conveyed by a variety of acoustic cues. Notably, the positive association between sound intensity and arousal has particular biological relevance. However, although amplitude normalization is a common procedure used to control for intensity in music psychology research, direct comparisons between emotional ratings of original...

Subjective complexity has been found to be related to hedonic measures of preference, pleasantness and beauty, but there is no consensus about the nature of this relationship in the visual and musical domains. Moreover, the affective content of stimuli has been largely neglected so far in the study of complexity but is crucial in many everyday cont...

Relationships between pleasantness, arousal and complexity, analyzed for males and females, in a set of IAPS pictures. Low numbers refer to low ratings of pleasantness, arousal and complexity, respectively. A) Relationship between pleasantness and arousal for females. B) Relationship between complexity and arousal for females. C) Relationship betwe...

Partial Spearman’s rank-order correlations controlling for effects of familiarity, between ratings of complexity, pleasantness and arousal in response to piano solo music (N = 92). (PDF)

Relationships between pleasantness, arousal and complexity, analyzed for males and females, in a set of piano solo and piano trio excerpts. Low numbers refer to low ratings of pleasantness, arousal and complexity, respectively. A) Relationship between pleasantness and arousal for females. B) Relationship between complexity and arousal for females....

Spearman’s rank-order correlations between a representative set of measures of objective complexity applied to a set of IAPS pictures (N = 96). (PDF)

Summary of linear stepwise regression analysis for seven variables of objective complexity predicting subjective complexity ratings of IAPS pictures (N = 72). (PDF)

Partial Spearman’s rank-order correlations, controlling for effects of familiarity, between ratings of complexity, pleasantness and arousal in response to representational paintings (N = 96). (PDF)

Spearman’s rank-order correlations between a representative set of measures of objective complexity applied to a set of representational paintings (N =96). (PDF)

Relationships between pleasantness, arousal and complexity, analyzed for males and females, in a set of representational paintings. Low numbers refer to low ratings of pleasantness, arousal and complexity, respectively. A) Relationship between pleasantness and arousal for females. B) Relationship between complexity and arousal for females. C) Relat...

Summary of linear stepwise regression analysis for seven variables of objective complexity predicting subjective complexity ratings of representational paintings (N = 64). (PDF)

Spearman’s rank-order correlations between four measures of objective complexity applied to a set of piano solo excerpts (N = 92) and to a set of piano solo music excerpts combined with piano trio excerpts (N = 80). (PDF)

List of 96 representational paintings. (PDF)

List of 40 Romantic piano chamber music excerpts. (PDF)

Relationships between pleasantness, arousal and complexity, analyzed for males and females, in a set of piano solo music excerpts. Low numbers refer to low ratings of pleasantness, arousal and complexity, respectively. A) Relationship between pleasantness and arousal for females. B) Relationship between complexity and arousal for females. C) Relati...

Partial Spearman’s rank-order correlations between ratings of complexity, pleasantness and arousal, controlling for effects of familiarity, in response to IAPS pictures (N = 96). Delete this. (PDF)

Summary of linear stepwise regression analysis for four variables of objective complexity predicting subjective complexity of piano solo music (N = 79). (PDF)

Partial Spearman’s rank-order correlations, controlling for effects of familiarity, between ratings of complexity, pleasantness and arousal in response to piano solo and piano trio excerpts (N = 80). (PDF)

Summary of linear stepwise regression analysis for four variables of objective complexity predicting subjective complexity ratings of piano solo and piano trio excerpts (N = 67). (PDF)

List of 96 IAPS pictures. (PDF)

List of 92 Romantic piano solo music excerpts. (PDF)

A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the capacity to process music. We examined sensitivi...

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized primarily by difficulties in the pitch domain. The aim of the present study was to investigate the perception of musical timbre in a group of individuals with congenital amusia by probing discrimination and short-term memory for real-world timbral stimuli as well as examining...

Arousal and valence (pleasantness) are considered primary dimensions of emotion. However, the degree to which these dimensions interact in emotional processing across sensory modalities is poorly understood. We addressed this issue by applying a crossmodal priming paradigm in which auditory primes (Romantic piano solo music) varying in arousal and/...

The potential of music to communicate emotions is part of our everyday experience. Music psychologists have distinguished between emotion perception, which refers to the perception of emotions expressed by music without evoking affective responses in the listeners, and emotion induction, which refers to listeners' affective response to music. Here,...

Music and language are distinct auditory domains serving different communicative uses. These differences may be less apparent in infants, and similar learning mechanisms may be applied in the syntactic development of both domains. By using a harmonic priming paradigm, this study revealed that 4- to 5-year-old children have implicit knowledge of Wes...