Astrid Schepman

Structural and dialectal effects on pitch peak alignment in two varieties of British English

We report three experiments, based on test sentences read aloud, on the influence of sentence position and phonological vowel length on the alignment of accent-related f0 peaks in Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Southern British English (RP). One experiment deals with prenuclear accent peaks and the other two with nuclear accent peaks. Three findings confirm reports in the recent literature on several other European languages. First, as has been reported for Dutch [Ladd, D.R., Mennen, I., & Schepman, A. (2000). Phonological conditioning of peak alignment in rising pitch accents in Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 107, 2685–2696], the alignment of prenuclear peaks is later with phonologically short vowels than with long ones, and the effect cannot be explained by actual vowel duration but appears to reflect syllable structure. Second, nuclear peaks are aligned much earlier (relative to the accented vowel) than prenuclear peaks, and, as in Dutch [Schepman, A., Lickley, R., & Ladd, D.R. (2006). Effects of vowel length and ‘right context’ on the alignment of Dutch nuclear accents. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 1–28], the effect of syllable structure appears to be absent in nuclear accents; instead, their alignment is strongly influenced by whether the accented syllable is in utterance-final position. Third, as in a number of other studies, we find evidence for differences of phonetic detail between languages or language varieties: both nuclear and prenuclear peaks are aligned later in SSE than in RP, and nuclear peaks appear to be aligned earlier in English than in Dutch.

Prosody and parsing in coordination structures

The effect of prosodic boundary cues on the off-line disambiguation and on-line parsing of coordination structures was examined. It was found that relative clauses were attached to coordinated object noun phrases in preference to second conjuncts in sentences like: The lawyer greeted the powerful barrister and the wise judge who was/were walking to the courtroom. Naive speakers signalled the syntactic contrast between the two structures by a prosodic break between the conjuncts when the relative clause was attached to the second conjunct. Listeners were able to use this prosodic information in both off-line syntactic disambiguation and on-line syntactic parsing. The findings are compatible with a model in which prosody has a strong immediate effect on parsing. It is argued that the current experimental design has avoided confounds present in earlier studies on the on-line integration of prosodic and syntactic information.

Valence-specific laterality effects in vocal emotion: Interactions with stimulus type, blocking and sex

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were dependent on blocked presentation of the emotion conditions, on the naturalness of the emotional stimuli, or on listener sex. We presented happy and sad sentences, paired with neutral counterparts, dichotically in an emotion localisation task, with vocal stimuli being preceded by verbal labels indicating target emotions. The measure was accuracy. When stimuli of the same emotion were presented as a block, a valence-specific laterality effect was demonstrated, but only in original stimuli and not morphed stimuli. There was a separate interaction with listener sex. We interpret our findings as suggesting that the valence-specific laterality hypothesis is supported only in certain circumstances. We discuss modulating factors, and we consider whether the mechanisms underlying those factors may be attentional or experiential in nature.

The influence of position and context on facial attractiveness

It has been shown that a persons position in a group influences how that person is evaluated, with people in the middle perceived as more important than people on the fringe of a group. Four experiments examined whether the position of a face, in a line of five faces, influenced facial attractiveness. The middle position influenced the perceived attractiveness of the target face but the direction of this effect depended on the attractiveness of the target and the surrounding faces. Attractive faces were perceived as less attractive when in the middle of unattractive faces, or faces of average attractiveness. Conversely, unattractive faces were perceived as more attractive when in the middle of other unattractive faces. These results have wide implications, suggesting that the more central a stimulus is in a context then the greater the influence of the context on the judgment of that stimulus.

Right-lateralized unconscious, but not conscious, processing of affective environmental sounds

ABSTRACT Much research on the laterality of affective auditory stimuli features emotional speech. However, environmental sounds can also carry affective information, but their lateralized processing for affect has been studied much less. We studied this in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1 we explored whether the detection of affective environmental sounds (from International Affective Digital Sounds) that appeared in auditory scenes was lateralized. While we found that negative targets were detected more rapidly, detection latencies were the same on the left and right. In Experiment 2 we examined whether conscious appraisal of the stimulus was needed for lateralization patterns to emerge, and asked participants to rate the stimulis pleasantness in a dichotic listening test. This showed that when positive/negative environmental sounds were in the attended to-be-rated channel, ratings were the same regardless of laterality. However, when participants rated neutral stimuli and the unattended channel was positive/negative, the valence of the unattended channel affected the neutral ratings more strongly with left ear (right hemisphere, RH) processing of the affective sound. We link our findings to previous work that suggests that the RH may specialize in the unconscious processing of emotion via subcortical routes.

The Development of Shared Liking of Representational but not Abstract Art in Primary School Children and Their Justifications for Liking

Understanding how aesthetic preferences are shared among individuals, and its developmental time course, is a fundamental question in aesthetics. It has been shown that semantic associations, in response to representational artworks, overlap more strongly among individuals than those generated by abstract artworks and that the emotional valence of the associations also overlaps more for representational artworks. This valence response may be a key driver in aesthetic appreciation. The current study tested predictions derived from the semantic association account in a developmental context. Twenty 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children (n = 80) were shown 20 artworks (10 representational, 10 abstract) and were asked to rate each artwork and to explain their decision. Cross-observer agreement in aesthetic preferences increased with age from 4–8 years for both abstract and representational art. However, after age 6 the level of shared appreciation for representational and abstract artworks diverged, with significantly higher levels of agreement for representational than abstract artworks at age 8 and 10. The most common justifications for representational artworks involved subject matter, while for abstract artworks formal artistic properties and color were the most commonly used justifications. Representational artwork also showed a significantly higher proportion of associations and emotional responses than abstract artworks. In line with predictions from developmental cognitive neuroscience, references to the artist as an agent increased between ages 4 and 6 and again between ages 6 and 8, following the development of Theory of Mind. The findings support the view that increased experience with representational content during the life span reduces inter-individual variation in aesthetic appreciation and increases shared preferences. In addition, brain and cognitive development appear to impact on art appreciation at milestone ages.

Greater cross-viewer similarity of semantic associations for representational than for abstract artworks

It has been shown previously that liking and valence of associations in response to artworks show greater convergence across viewers for representational than for abstract artwork. The current research explored whether the same applies to the semantic content of the associations. We used data gained with an adapted unique corporate association valence measure, which invited 24 participants to give short verbal responses to 11 abstract and 11 representational artworks. We paired the responses randomly to responses given to the same artwork and computed semantic similarity scores using UMBC Ebiquity software. This showed significantly greater semantic similarity scores for representational than for abstract art. A control analysis in which responses were randomly paired with responses from the same category (abstract, representational) showed no significant results, ruling out a baseline effect. For both abstract and representational artworks, randomly paired responses resembled each other less than responses from the same artworks, but the effect was much larger for representational artworks. Our work shows that individuals share semantic associations with other viewers in response to artworks to a greater extent when the artwork is representational than when it is abstract. Our novel method shows potential utility for many areas of psychology that aim to understand the semantic convergence of peoples verbal responses, not least aesthetic psychology.

Affective theory of mind inferences contextually influence the recognition of emotional facial expressions

ABSTRACT The recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions (Experiment 1) as well as differently-valenced emotions (Experiment 2) conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contextual influence to the recognition of emotional facial expressions for both same and different valences.

A leftward perceptual asymmetry when judging the attractiveness of visual patterns

ABSTRACT Perceptual judgements concerning the magnitude of a stimulus feature are typically influenced more by the left side of the stimulus than by the right side. This research examined whether the leftward bias also applies to judgements of the attractiveness of abstract visual patterns. Across four experiments participants chose between two versions of a stimulus which either had an attractive left side or an attractive right side. Experiments 1 and 2 presented artworks and experiments 3 and 4 presented wallpaper designs. In each experiment participants showed a significant bias to choose the stimulus with an attractive left side more than the stimulus with an attractive right side. The leftward bias emerged at age 10/11, was not caused by a systematic asymmetry in the perception of colourfulness or complexity, and was stronger when the difference in attractiveness between the left and right sides was larger. The results are relevant to the aesthetics of product and packaging design and show that leftward biases extend to the perceptual judgement of everyday items. Possible causes of the leftward bias for attractiveness judgements are discussed and it is suggested that the size of the bias may not be a measure of the degree of hemispheric specialization.

Right-ear precedence and vocal emotion contagion: The role of the left hemisphere

ABSTRACT Much evidence suggests that the processing of emotions is lateralized to the right hemisphere of the brain. However, under some circumstances the left hemisphere might play a role, particularly for positive emotions and emotional experiences. We explored whether emotion contagion was right-lateralized, lateralized valence-specifically, or potentially left-lateralized. In two experiments, right-handed female listeners rated to what extent emotionally intoned pseudo-sentences evoked target emotions in them. These sound stimuli had a 7 ms ear lead in the left or right channel, leading to stronger stimulation of the contralateral hemisphere. In both experiments, the results revealed that right ear lead stimuli received subtly but significantly higher evocation scores, suggesting a left hemisphere dominance for emotion contagion. A control experiment using an emotion identification task showed no effect of ear lead. The findings are discussed in relation to prior findings that have linked the processing of emotional prosody to left-hemisphere brain regions that regulate emotions, control orofacial musculature, are involved in affective empathy processing areas, or have an affinity for processing emotions socially. Future work is needed to eliminate alternative interpretations and understand the mechanisms involved. Our novel binaural asynchrony method may be useful in future work in auditory laterality.