Marius Raab

Investigating emotional responses to self-selected sad music via self-report and automated facial analysis

People often listen to sad music in spite of its seemingly negative qualities. Sad music, and especially sad music with a personal significance, has been shown to evoke a wide span of emotions with both positive and negative qualities. We compared emotional responses to familiar self-selected sad music (SSSM) with both unfamiliar sad and unfamiliar happy music. Alongside self-reports, a commercial, continuous measure of discrete facial expressions was applied, promising an in-depth assessment of both the quality and strength of experienced affective states at any given point in time. Results of the facial analysis showed that SSSM evoked more mixed affective states than unfamiliar sad music. Also, listeners reacted with consistent facial expressions to distinct musical events, e.g. the introduction of a lead voice. SSSM evoked more self-reported feelings of nostalgia, reminiscence, being moved, and chills and tears than unfamiliar sad and happy music. Furthermore, SSSM resulted in more self-reported happiness and a similar trend with happy facial expressions compared to unfamiliar sad music. These results point to the emotional diversity and the strong involvement of positive affective states elicited by SSSM, even when compared with music of similar quality, such as unfamiliar sad music. Automated facial analysis allows us to observe emotions on a more detailed level in terms of time resolution, onset, intensity and concurrence of discrete affective states. This technique is promising for future research, particularly when investigating mixed emotions and the social aspect of emotions in response to music.

The Sarrazin effect: the presence of absurd statements in conspiracy theories makes canonical information less plausible

Reptile prime ministers and flying Nazi saucers—extreme and sometimes off-wall conclusion are typical ingredients of conspiracy theories. While individual differences are a common research topic concerning conspiracy theories, the role of extreme statements in the process of acquiring and passing on conspiratorial stories has not been regarded in an experimental design so far. We identified six morphological components of conspiracy theories empirically. On the basis of these content categories a set of narrative elements for a 9/11 story was compiled. These elements varied systematically in terms of conspiratorial allegation, i.e., they contained official statements concerning the events of 9/11, statements alleging to a conspiracy limited in time and space as well as extreme statements indicating an all-encompassing cover-up. Using the method of narrative construction, 30 people were given a set of cards with these statements and asked to construct the course of events of 9/11 they deem most plausible. When extreme statements were present in the set, the resulting stories were more conspiratorial; the number of official statements included in the narrative dropped significantly, whereas the self-assessment of the storys plausibility did not differ between conditions. This indicates that blatant statements in a pool of information foster the synthesis of conspiracy theories on an individual level. By relating these findings to one of Germanys most successful (and controversial) non-fiction books, we refer to the real-world dangers of this effect.

Thirty shades of truth: conspiracy theories as stories of individuation, not of pathological delusion.

Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements. Recipients are considered as consumers only. Two empirical studies—a conventional survey (n = 63) and a study using the method of narrative construction (n = 30)—which were recently conducted by the authors of this paper—suggest that the truth about conspiracy theories is more complex. Given a set of statements about a dramatic historic event (in our case 9/11) that includes official testimonies, allegations to a conspiracy and extremely conspiratorial statements, the majority of participants created a narrative of 9/11 they deemed plausible that might be considered a conspiracy theory. The resulting 30 idiosyncratic stories imply that no clear distinction between official story and conspiratorial narrative is possible any more when the common approach of questionnaires is abandoned. Based on these findings, we present a new theoretical and methodological approach which acknowledges conspiracy theories as a means of constructing and communicating a set of personal values. While broadening the view upon such theories, we stay compatible with other approaches that have focused on extreme theory types. In our view, accepting conspiracy theories as a common, regulative and possibly benign phenomenon, we will be better able to understand why some people cling to immunized, racist and off-wall stories—and others do not.

Semantic Stability is More Pleasurable in Unstable Episodic Contexts. On the Relevance of Perceptual Challenge in Art Appreciation

Research in the field of psychological aesthetics points to the appeal of stimuli which defy easy recognition by being “semantically unstable” but which still allow for creating meaning—in the ongoing process of elaborative perception or as an end product of the entire process. Such effects were reported for hidden images (Muth and Carbon, 2013) as well as Cubist artworks concealing detectable—although fragmented—objects (Muth et al., 2013). To test the stability of the relationship between semantic determinacy and appreciation across different episodic contexts, 30 volunteers evaluated an artistic movie continuously on visual determinacy or liking via the Continuous Evaluation Procedure (CEP, Muth et al., 2015b). The movie consisted of five episodes with emerging Gestalts. In the first between-participants condition, the hidden Gestalts in the movie episodes were of increasing determinacy, in the second condition, the episodes showed decreasing determinacies of hidden Gestalts. In the increasing-determinacy group, visual determinacy was rated higher and showed better predictive quality for liking than in the decreasing-determinacy group. Furthermore, when the movie started with low visual determinacy of hidden Gestalts, unexpectedly strong increases in visual determinacy had a bigger effect on liking than in the condition which allowed for weaker Gestalt recognition after having started with highly determinate Gestalts. The resulting pattern calls for consideration of the episodic context when examining art appreciation.

From sensorimotor graphs to rules: an agent learns from a stream of experience

In this paper we argue that a philosophically and psychologically grounded autonomous agent is able to learn recursive rules from basic sensorimotor input. A sensorimotor graph of the agents environment is generated that stores and optimises beneficial motor activations in evaluated sensor space by employing temporal Hebbian learning. This results in a categorized stream of experience that feeds in a Minerva memory model which is enriched by a time line approach and integrated in the cognitive architecture Psi--including motivation and emotion. These memory traces feed seamlessly into the inductive rule acquisition device Igor2 and the resulting recursive rules are made accessible in the same memory store. A combination of cognitive theories from the 1980ies and state-of-the-art computer science thus is a plausible approach to the still prevailing symbol grounding problem.

Heute ist alles „post“

Die drei Herausforderungen – Postmoderne, Postdemokratie, Postfaktizitat – sind alle nicht neu, werden aber in dieser Kombination von den Menschen als immer bedrohlicher erlebt. Dies kann ein Grund dafur sein, dass Menschen nach alternativen Erklarungen fur wichtige Ereignisse und gesellschaftliche Vorgange suchen.

Expecting the Unexpected: How Gallery Visitors Experience Semantic Instability in Art

The perception of artworks rarely—if ever—results in the instantiation of a determinate meaning. Instead, when entering an art gallery, we often expect Semantic Instability ( SeIns ): the experience of perceptual and cognitive habits being challenged. By comparing the experience of an artistic movie in an exhibition with the experience in a laboratory via the Continuous Evaluation Procedure, we found that the movie was less semantically unstable and more pleasing to the eyes of gallery visitors than to those of participants in the laboratory. These findings suggest that a gallery context might induce the expectation of perceptual challenge, thus decreasing the intensity of SeIns and at the same time heightening the appreciation of SeIns . Exhibition visitors might even be on the lookout for challenging experiences.

The Power of Shape: How Shape of Node-Link Diagrams Impacts Aesthetic Appreciation and Triggers Interest:

Positive effects of aesthetically appreciated designs have long been studied and confirmed since the 19th century: such designs are more enjoyable, they are more forgivable for glitches and can increase users’ performance. In the field of information visualization, studies of aesthetics are still a niche approach. In the current study, we aim to specifically understand which parameters in a visualization of node-link diagrams make them aesthetically pleasing-an important extension to already existing research on usability and readability aspects. We investigated how the shape of the outline of such diagrams influences the aesthetic judgments on two of the most important dimensions of aesthetic appeal: beauty and interest. We employed different outlines to node-link diagrams and compared them with uniformly filled shapes, varying two important variables typically impacting aesthetics: complexity and curvature. This was done for a short (100 ms) and ad libitum presentation time. Diagrams with curvier outlines were perceived as more beautiful, while diagrams with more complex outlines were considered to be more interesting. These dependencies already exist for presaccadic perception (100 ms) and are slightly stronger for unlimited presentation time. We also found that curvature is a predictor for beauty only for unlimited presentation time. Aesthetic appeal was very similar for diagrams and pure shapes, so many results from fundamental research on aesthetics can potentially be transferred to the community of network visualization, assisting to improve visualizations also in aesthetic regards.

Die Kraft der Erzählung: Warum wir (Verschwörungs-)Geschichten lieben

Wir erinnern uns, denken und traumen in Geschichten. Zugleich haben wir den Drang, Zusammenhange zu entdecken und unwillkurlich Kausalitaten und Intentionen wahrzunehmen. Diese Mechanismen sind die Bausteine der ersten Verdachtsmomente von Verschworungen. Narrative Universalien sind wiederkehrende Erzahlelemente uber verschiedene Zeiten und Kulturen hinweg, hierzu scheint auch das „verborgene Wirken von Kraften“ zu gehoren. Gute Geschichten weisen oft Lucken auf; fordern heraus oder uberraschen und bieten unvollstandige Kausalstrange, die die Betrachterin und der Betrachter schliesen kann – und das auf vergnugliche Weise. Das konnte auch ein Anreiz fur das Aufdecken von Verschworungen sein.

Am Anfang war die Verschwörungstheorie

Wann entstand die erste Verschworungstheorie? Sicher wissen konnen wir das nicht. Wir nehmen aber an, dass die erste Verschworungstheorie etwa 12.000 Jahre vor Beginn unserer Zeitrechnung entstand, irgendwo im heutigen Syrien. Seitdem sind Geschichten uber Verschworungen Teil unserer Kulturgeschichte.