0000000001284805
AUTHOR
Emily Carlson
The Role of Music in Everyday Life During the First Wave of the Coronavirus Pandemic : A Mixed-Methods Exploratory Study
Although music is known to be a part of everyday life and a resource for mood and emotion management, everyday life has changed significantly for many due to the global coronavirus pandemic, making the role of music in everyday life less certain. An online survey in which participants responded to Likert scale questions as well as providing free text responses was used to explore how participants were engaging with music during the first wave of the pandemic, whether and how they were using music for mood regulation, and how their engagement with music related to their experiences of worry and anxiety resulting from the pandemic. Results indicated that, for the majority of participants, whi…
Reopening the Conversation Between Music Psychology and Music Therapy
Although the fields of music psychology and music therapy share many common interests, research collaboration between the two fields is still somewhat rare. Previous work has identified that disciplinary identities and attitudes towards those in other disciplines are challenges to effective interdisciplinary research. The current study explores such attitudes in music therapy and music psychology. A sample of 123 music therapists and music psychologists answered an online survey regarding their attitudes towards potential interdisciplinary work between the two fields. Analysis of results suggested that participants’ judgements of the attitudes of members of the other discipline were not alw…
Kinematics of perceived dyadic coordination in dance
We investigated the relationships between perceptions of similarity and interaction in spontaneously dancing dyads, and movement features extracted using novel computational methods. We hypothesized that dancers’ movements would be perceived as more similar when they exhibited spatially and temporally comparable movement patterns, and as more interactive when they spatially oriented more towards each other. Pairs of dancers were asked to move freely to two musical excerpts while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. Subsequently, in two separate perceptual experiments we presented stick figure animations of the dyads to observers, who rated degree of interaction and si…
Adapting to Change : How the COVID-19 Pandemic has Impacted the Music Therapy Profession
COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. Since then, it has had an undeniable impact on many aspects of society, with far-reaching effects. The COVID-19 pandemic has likely affected music therapists in various ways, as they typically work in-person with their clients, often in healthcare related settings. This study aims to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the professional practice of music therapists. A questionnaire was shared online to certified music therapists around the world during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were three broad areas of inquiry that the questionnaire covered, including the situational changes and/or practical adaptati…
Trait empathy modulates music-related functional connectivity
It has been well established through behavioural studies that empathy significantly influences music perception. Such individual differences typically manifest as variability in whole brain functional connectivity patterns. To date, nobody has examined the modulatory effect of empathy on functional connectivity patterns during continuous music listening. In the present study, we seek to investigate the global and local connectivity patterns of 36 participants whose fMRI scanning was done by employing the naturalistic paradigm wherein they listened to a continuous piece of music. We used graph-based measures of functional connectivity to identify how cognitive and affective components of emp…
Decoding Individual differences and musical preference via music-induced movement.
AbstractMovement is a universal response to music, with dance often taking place in social settings. Although previous work has suggested that socially relevant information, such as personality and gender, are encoded in dance movement, the generalizability of previous work is limited. The current study aims to decode dancers’ gender, personality traits, and music preference from music-induced movements. We propose a method that predicts such individual difference from free dance movements, and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method by using two data sets collected using different musical stimuli. In addition, we introduce a novel measure to explore the relative importance of dif…
A Test of the Relationship Between Argumentativeness and Individualism/Collectivism in the United States and Finland
This study explored relationships between argumentativeness and collectivism/individualism in Finland and the United States. Data were gathered in the United States (n = 412) and Finland (n = 261). The analysis suggested: (a) collectivism was negatively correlated with argumentativeness, (b) individualism was positively correlated with argumentativeness, and (c) Finnish participants reported lower levels of argumentativeness than Americans. Cultural differences between the United States and Finland are discussed as reasons for the differences between the nations on argumentativeness.
Postural and gestural synchronization, sequential imitation, and mirroring predict perceived coupling of dancing dyads
Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time-delayed relations, and horizontal mirrorin…
Embodied Meter Revisited : Entrainment, Musical Content, and Genre in Music-Induced Movement
Previous research has shown that humans tend to embody musical meter at multiple beat levels during spontaneous dance. This work that been based on identifying typical periodic movement patterns, or eigenmovements, and has relied on time-domain analyses. The current study: 1) presents a novel method of using time-frequency analysis in conjunction with group-level tensor decomposition; 2) compares its results to time-domain analysis, and 3) investigates how the amplitude of eigenmovements depends on musical content and genre. Data comprised three-dimensional motion capture of 72 participants’ spontaneous dance movements to 16 stimuli including eight different genres. Each trial was subjected…
Towards Multimodal MIR: Predicting individual differences from music-induced movement
As the field of Music Information Retrieval grows, it is important to take into consideration the multi-modality of music and how aspects of musical engagement such as movement and gesture might be taken into account. Bodily movement is universally associated with music and reflective of important individual features related to music preference such as personality, mood, and empathy. Future multimodal MIR systems may benefit from taking these aspects into account. The current study addresses this by identifying individual differences, specifically Big Five personality traits, and scores on the Empathy and Systemizing Quotients (EQ/SQ) from participants' free dance movements. Our model succe…
Reopening the Conversation Between Music Psychology and Music Therapy : A Survey of Interdisciplinary Attitudes
Although the fields of music psychology and music therapy share many common interests, research collaboration between the two fields is still somewhat rare. Previous work has identified that disciplinary identities and attitudes towards those in other disciplines are challenges to effective interdisciplinary research. The current study explores such attitudes in music therapy and music psychology. A sample of 123 music therapists and music psychologists answered an online survey regarding their attitudes towards potential interdisciplinary work between the two fields. Analysis of results suggested that participants’ judgements of the attitudes of members of the other discipline were not alw…
A test of the relationship between argumentativeness, individualism/collectivism, and conflict style preference in the United States and Finland
This study explored relationships between argumentativeness and collectivism/individualism in Finland and the United States. Data were gathered in the United States (n = 412) and Finland (n = 261). The analysis suggested: (a) collectivism was negatively correlated with argumentativeness, (b) individualism was positively correlated with argumentativeness, and (c) Finnish participants reported lower levels of argumentativeness than Americans. Cultural differences between the United States and Finland are discussed as reasons for the differences between the nations on argumentativeness. peerReviewed
Affect regulation, mental health disorders, and maladaptive brain responses in music listening : a correlational study
Affect regulation may be defined as a process by which an individual maintains or modifies his or her mood or emotional state, by conscious or automatic processes. Adequate affect regulation may play an important role in mitigating or preventing mental illness, which is a widespread, inadequately treated and inadequately understood phenomenon. Music, which is known to express and induce emotions, may be used for affect regulation in a variety of ways, both self-directed and in therapeutic contexts. The effectiveness, however, of different uses of music in affect regulation is not yet understood. Both psychological testing and neuro-imaging were used to explore the relationship between indiv…
Me, you and the dance : effects of individual differences and social context on music-induced movement
To dance is usually to dance with someone else. Dance often takes place in social contexts such as a club or party, where individuals’ movements not only reflect their own traits and feelings but can the movements of others in many ways. The aim of this thesis is to study some of the factors that may affect music-induced movement in social contexts, particularly trait empathy. The thesis also aims to investigate the influence of inherently dyadic features, such as similarity between dance partners, and to explore how entrainment and interaction can be quantified in a free dance movement context using a variety of analytic approaches. A first analysis of individual dance data from 30 partici…