Barking Up The Wrong Tree

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Most people report that listening to music sometimes creates chills—feeling goose bumps and shivers on the neck, scalp, and spine—but some people seem to never experience them. The present research examined who tends to experience music-induced chills and why. A sample of young adults completed measures of chills, the Big Five domains, and their music preferences, habits, and experiences. Latent variable models found that openness to experience was the strongest predictor of the typical experience of chills during music. Several mediation models considered likely mediators of this effect. Openness to experience predicted music preferences, particularly for reflective and complex genres, but genre preferences did not in turn predict chills. In contrast, several markers of people’s experience and engagement with music in everyday life, such as listening to music more often and valuing music, did mediate openness’s effects. Some implications for bridging state and trait approaches to the chills experience are considered.

Source: “Shivers and Timbres: Personality and the Experience of Chills From Music” from Social Psychological and Personality Science

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A class of metaphors links the experience of anger to perceptions of redness. Whether such metaphors have significant implications for understanding perception is not known. In Experiment 1, anger (versus sadness) concepts were primed and it was found that priming anger concepts led individuals to be more likely to perceive the color red. In Experiment 2, anger states were directly manipulated, and it was found that evoking anger led individuals to be more likely to perceive red. Both experiments showed that the observed effects were independent of the actual color presented. These findings extend the New Look, perceptual, metaphoric, and social cognitive literatures. Most important, the results suggest that emotion representation processes of a metaphoric type can be extended to the perceptual realm.

Source: “Anger as Seeing Red: Perceptual Sources of Evidence” from Social Psychological and Personality Science

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Many factors are known to be associated with psychological well-being. However, it is much less clear whether those factors actually cause well-being and, hence, whether there is any practical value in trying to manipulate those factors to increase well-being. The proposed study addresses both the theoretical and practical issues by testing the effectiveness of an empirically-derived, brief psychological intervention to increase well-being in a non-clinical, unselected sample. The intervention focused on developing goal setting and planning (GAP) skills, which are known to be linked to well-being, potentially have widespread effects, and are amenable to intervention. Within a quasi-experimental design, participants received three, 1-h, group sessions (Study 1) or completed the programme individually in their own time (Study 2). Those taking part in the intervention, both individually and in a group, showed significant increases in subjective well-being, compared to their respective control groups not receiving the intervention. The results provide preliminary support for the view that (a) goal setting and planning skills have a causal link to subjective well-being and (b) that such skills can be learned to enhance well-being.

Source: “Increasing well-being through teaching goal-setting and planning skills: results of a brief intervention” from Journal of Happiness Studies

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