Venla Berg

The preattentive processing of major vs. minor chords in the human brain: An event-related potential study.

Western music has two classifications that are highly familiar to all Western listeners: the dichotomy between the major and minor modalities and consonance vs. dissonance. We aimed at determining whether these classifications already take place at the level of the elicitation of the change-related mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP). To this end, we constructed an oddball-paradigm with root minor, dissonant and inverted major chords in a context of root major chords. These stimuli were composed so that the standard and deviant chords did not include a physically deviant frequency which could cause the MMN. The standard chords were transposed into 12 different keys (=pitch levels) and delivered to the participants while they were watching a silent movie (ignore condition) or detecting softer target sounds (detection condition). In the ignore condition, the MMN was significant for all but inverted major chords. In the detection condition, the MMN was significant for dissonant chords and soft target chords. Our results indicate that the processes underlying MMN are able to make discriminations which are qualitative by nature. Whether the classifications between major and minor modalities and consonance vs. dissonance are innate or based on implicit learning remains a question for the future.

Body Mass Index and Depressive Symptoms: Testing for Adverse and Protective Associations in Two Twin Cohort Studies

Studies have suggested both adverse and protective associations of obesity with depressive symptoms. We examined the contribution of environmental and heritable factors in this association. Participants were same-sex twin pairs from two population-based twin cohort studies, the Older Finnish Twin Cohort (n = 8,215; mean age = 44.1) and the US Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS; n = 1,105; mean age = 45.1). Body mass index (BMI) was calculated from self-reported height and weight. Depressive symptoms were assessed using Becks Depression Inventory (BDI; Finnish Twin Cohort), and by negative and positive affect scales (MIDUS). In the Finnish Twin Cohort, higher BMI was associated with higher depressive symptoms in monozygotic (MZ) twins (B = 2.01, 95% CI = 1.0, 3.0) and dizygotic (DZ) twins (B = 1.17, 0.5, 1.9) with BMI >22. This association was observed in within-pair analysis in DZ twins (B = 1.47, CI = 0.4, 2.6) but not in within-pair analysis of MZ twins (B = 0.03, CI = -1.9, 2.0). Consistent with the latter result, a bivariate genetic model indicated that the association between higher BMI and higher depressive symptoms was largely mediated by genetic factors. The results of twin-pair analysis and bivariate genetic model were replicated in the MIDUS sample. These findings suggest an association between obesity and higher depressive symptoms, which is largely explained by shared heritable biological mechanisms.

The Company You Keep Personality and Friendship Characteristics

Studies on personality and friendship have focused on similarities between friends, while differences in friendship patterns have received less attention. We used data from the British Household Panel Survey data (N = 12,098) to investigate how people’s personalities are related to various characteristics of their three closest friends. All personality traits of the five-factor model were associated with several friendship characteristics with effect sizes corresponding to correlations between −.06 and .09. Openness was especially prominent and idiosyncratic; individuals with high (vs. low) openness were about 3% more likely to have friends who live further away, are of the opposite sex and another ethnicity, and whom they meet less often. Agreeableness and extroversion were related to more traditional friendship ties. Individuals with high agreeableness had known their friends for a longer time, lived close to them, and had more “stay-at-homes” among their friends.

Network of families in a contemporary population: regional and cultural assortativity

Using a large dataset with individual-level demographic information of almost 60,000 families in contemporary Finland, we analyse the regional variation and cultural assortativity by studying the network between families and the network between kins. For the network of families the largest connected component is found to consist of around 1000 families mostly originated from one single region in Western Finland. We characterize the networks in terms of the basic structural properties. In particular, we focus on the k-cores and the presence of transitive triangles. Clustering in the networks is found to result from homophily by language and religious affiliations. The large network fragments appear to be small-worlds. We also compare the fragments in the kin network with respect to the average coefficient of relationship. The measures of assortativity are able to distinguish the families in terms of their regions of origin. Overall, we distinguish between two patterns of regional effects, the ‘metropolitan’ and the ‘cultural’ pattern.