Psychology Articles - Essay Example

?Brains That Are out of Tune but in Time Krista L. Hyde and Isabelle Peretz’s article “Brains That Are out of Tune but in Time” delves into the potential causes of amusia, which is also known as tone deafness. The article opens with the authors declaring that a human’s ability to be musical is inherent, meaning that people are born musical. An infant under one year of age has perceptual abilities that are identical to the abilities of adults, and is capable of processing scales with unequal pitch steps and regular rhythms. This organization reveals that the processing of music is done based on expectancies and feelings of satisfaction. The ability of humans to organize music in this way without first being taught suggests that we are predisposed to musical abilities. However, it seems that many individuals are born without the predispositions for music. Hyde and Peretz make it clear that this lack of a musical predisposition has nothing to do with a low intelligence or environmental circumstances, such as a lack of stimulation. Indeed, some people who have been subjected to years of music lessons have shown to have lifelong musical handicaps, including congenital amusia, which is the focus of this study. As the numbers of those that have been diagnosed with this disorder is fairly small, many researchers do not find this particular disorder to be a genuine anomaly. Instead, they believe that congenital amusia effects those that are not musically intelligent. The authors of this study set out to prove that congenital amusia is a real disorder that does not come about as a result of low intelligence or a lack of subjection to music education. A prior study that had been undergone revealed that a minor but congenital neural abnormality may cause selective learning deficiencies. This prompted Hyde and Peretz to locate individuals with lifelong musical difficulties to determine if they had such congenital neural abnormalities. After gathering and studying eleven cases of musical disorders, the authors were able to declare, through multiple tests, that each individual had a deficit in discriminating and memorizing music. The authors declared these to be genuine learning disabilities. To back up their claim that music disorders have little to do with intelligence, the authors were able to show that the language skills of the individuals, such as recognizing song lyrics, were unaffected, as was their ability to process rhythm. The one test that was repeatedly failed by participants was the pitch-based test. This prompted the authors to conduct further research regarding the connection between pitch and tone deafness. The study conducted consisted of ten adults who were similar in their age, gender, education, and had no formal music education or a neurological history. These participants were tested based on their ability to discern changes in melody, including pitch and scale, and the assess rhythmic discrimination. Most participants passed the rhythmic discrimination test, but all failed the test on melody. When they were tested on their ability to detect changes in pitch, most of the participants were able to determine when a pitched increased, but all failed to determine when the pitch decreased. Hyde and Peretz were able to conclude that congenital amusia is a developmental disorder that results from a failure to encode pitch. They were also able to reveal that this disorder does not only apply to music, but also applies to a psychoacoustic difficulty in fine pitch resolution. Visual Skills in Airport-Security Screening “Visual Skills in Airport-Security Screening,” written by Jason S. McCarley, Arthur F. Kramer, Christopher D. Wickens, Eric D. Vidoni, and Walter R. Boot, discusses the visual performances of airport-security screeners during a simulated luggage-screening task, focusing on their individual abilities to locate a series of knives via x-ray images of cluttered luggage. This study was conducted in response to the many concerns that have arisen over the methods in which security screeners investigate luggage for potential weapons. Since the objects that they are looking for are dimmer than the array of background clutter, the perceptual and cognitive capacities of these screeners are strained, and thus require the tasks to be brought more into balance with the limits of human perception and cognition. The primary reason that security-screeners have difficultly in locating weapons among other objects is that many potential weapons appear heterogenous - most of them may appear as harmless objects in an x-ray. These screeners are used to the specific shapes of weapons, such as knives and guns, that other out-of-place objects that might be weapons could go completely unnoticed. The purpose of the study conducted and described in this article was to see if it were possible to improve the perceptive and cognitive abilities of screeners to prevent more weapons from making their way passed airport security. The experiment involved sixteen participants, all young adults around the age of twenty-one with normal visual acuity and normal color vision. The eye movements of the participants were studied during the course of the experiment. A total of eighty-nine pieces of luggage were used, each with varying degrees of clutter, and some pieces containing a knife or multiple knives concealed among the other objects. On the viewing screen, the researchers also digitally placed images of knives in a few pieces of luggage to determine how closely the participants were investigating the bags. The participants were set with the task of locating the knife in each stimulus image that they observed, which was undergone in numerous sessions to determine if skills improved over time. The results from this study first revealed that each participant was accurately identifying the hidden knives with faster speed and more precision during the final sessions of the experiment, proving that practice can enhance perception and cognitive skills. The analyses showed the sources of these improvements, such as oculomotor skills allowing the participant to quickly find a specific object after repeated practice, and improved sensitivity enhancing the ability to recognize targets. In conclusion, subjecting airport-screening security members to training that would allow them to learn to recognize various weapons would be beneficial in successfully locating them, regardless of how they look or where they are located in luggage full of distracting objects. Such training could greatly decrease the amount of weapons that are being passed through the screening process. Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners? In “Do Dogs Resemble Their Owners?”, researchers Michael M. Roy and Nicholas J.S. Christenfeld set out to answer the age-old query of whether dogs really do look like their owners. Many people have concluded that this is a myth, and that considerable time spent between an owner and their dog may prompt others to pick out similarities. However, Roy and Christenfeld were determined to scientifically test this notion. The authors accomplished this by photographing forty-five pet owners and their dogs. Judges were then given the photographs of the owner and their dog, as well as a picture of another unrelated dog. The judges were then instructed to match the owner with their dog based on physical appearance. The results of the study revealed that the majority of pets that were matched accurately to their owners were purebred dogs. The researchers believe this is due to the fact that the appearances of dogs that are not purebred cannot be predetermined, so appearance has very little authority over a person’s choice when picking a dog that is not purebred. Purebred dogs, on the other hand, are often picked solely based on appearance, and many of them do resemble their owners. Purebred owners are able to pick the pet of their choice. This brings the researchers to the conclusion that the majority of pet owners will pick a purebred dog that resembles them to some extent, having a taste for animals that are associated with their own appearance. For example, women with long hair had a preference for attractive dogs that had floppy ears, as opposed to dogs with pricked ears. However, the experiment did not reveal to what extent an owner looks into resemblance when it comes to choosing a dog, which makes the researchers believe that perhaps the decision is an unconscious one. Stereotype Susceptibility Margaret Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky, and Nalini Ambady’s article, “Stereotype Susceptibility,” looks into the effects of stereotyping on the success of individuals. The authors base their own study on previous studies that have shown that negative stereotyping can hinder the success of an individual, while positive or neutral stereotyping can improve their success. Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady believe that individuals respond based on the stereotypes that they are subjected to, and that these beliefs influence performance. For example, a negative stereotype that claims a specific gender or race is incapable of a certain task will cause the individual to react in a way, often unconsciously, that will reinforce the stereotype. The same concept is believed to hold true for stereotypes that are positive or encouraging. Shih, Pittinsky, and Ambady cite two such studies that show the implications of stereotyping on the performances of individuals. The first study was conducted by Steele and Aronson, who found that African-American students, who are often stereotyped to perform poorly in school, underperformed compared to white students on a test that they were informed would test their abilities. The second study was done by Levy, who found that elderly people performed worse on a test of their memory when they had been subjected to negative stereotypes of the elderly as opposed to positive stereotypes. The authors of this present study wanted to expand on what had already been decided by the aforementioned studies in regard to the effects of automatic and unconscious activation, focusing on the effects of activation of numerous identities that an individual may have and the positive effects on stereotypes to the performance of an individual. The participants of this study consisted of forty-six Asian-American female undergraduate students. They were presented with a questionnaire that delved into their lives and the educational opportunities they had been given, with different questionnaires being used to either influence the stereotype that Asians are exceptional at math or questions that did not play up to any assumed levels of intelligence. After completing the questionnaires, the participants were given twelve math questions to complete. The results of this study conclude that participants who were influenced by the stereotype that Asians were intelligent, especially at mathematics, answered more math questions correctly as opposed to the participants who were not influenced by any stereotype. The majority of the participants did not realize that their performance was being effected by the stereotypes, suggesting that their reactions were purely unconscious. This study was taken one step further to determine how an individual performs when they are subjected to a variety of stereotypes. The participants in this portion of the study consisted of nineteen Asian-American females students in high school, and the methods of the questionnaires and the math questions from the previous portion of the study were utilized. These participants were being investigated to determine if they were effected by the stereotypes that Asians were intelligent and that females performed less academically than males. The results of this portion of the study revealed that those in the neutral/positive stereotype that Asians are intelligent performed exceptionally better on the math questions than those who focused more on the negative stereotype that females are less intelligent than men. Thus, these two studies combined reveal that the performance of individuals can be dependent on the stereotypes that they have been subjected to. Why Are Average Faces Attractive? In “Why Are Average Faces Attractive?,” Tim Valentine, Stephen Darling, and Mary Donnelly explore the concept that faces whose symmetry is closer to the average are found to be more attractive than faces with different symmetry. While the majority of previous studies that have investigated this concept have focused on a full-view of the face, the researchers in this study also used profile views of women’s faces, which allowed the researchers to manipulate the images of women without overdoing the symmetry. This phenomenon was first observed in a study conducted in 1978 that revealed the blending of pictures of two attractive faces produced an even more attractive face, with the researcher of this experiment stating that there was an improvement on beauty. This was determined to be a result of the symmetry of the face becoming more average when the two separate faces were combined. This current study set out to affirm the results of this previous study. The participants of the first experiment consisted of forty-eight young adult to middle-aged males and females. These participants were given a pile of eight pairs of photographs that showed white females with neutral expressions, and then asked to pick the most attractive female from the pair. Many of the photographs, all of which revealed full-view and profile-view of the females, had been digitally enhanced to make their faces more symmetrical. The results of this study revealed that there was a greater preference for full-face views that were more symmetrically closer to the average shape. The second portion of the study altered the images of the females, changing the smoothness of their faces to appear less perfectly shaped and to introduce lines and wrinkles, or even smoothing the faces further. The images were digitally enhanced to morph the faces of the females in the images. Forty-eight participants, males and females, were involved in this portion of the study, with the age ranging from eighteen to fifty. They were presented with the images of the females, though they only got to see one view of their face, whether it was full face or profile. The method was similar to the previous one, involving the participants to decide which face was most attractive. The results of this portion of the study revealed that most people preferred the full face of the picture over the profile as they were able to get a better idea of the shape of the face. The results of both studies helped to determine that there is a much greater preference for faces whose shapes are closer to average symmetry. Read More