Neural processing of poems and songs is based on melodic properties.

The neural processing of speech and music is still a matter of debate. A long tradition that assumes shared processing capacities for the two domains contrasts with views that assume domain-specific processing. We here contribute to this topic by investigating, in a functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) study, ecologically valid stimuli that are identical in wording and differ only in that one group is typically spoken (or silently read), whereas the other is sung: poems and their respective musical settings. We focus on the melodic properties of spoken poems and their sung musical counterparts by looking at proportions of significant autocorrelations (PSA) based on pitch values extracted from their recordings. Following earlier studies, we assumed a bias of poem-processing towards the left and a bias for song-processing on the right hemisphere. Furthermore, PSA values of poems and songs were expected to explain variance in left- vs. right-temporal brain areas, while continuous liking ratings obtained in the scanner should modulate activity in the reward network. Overall, poem processing compared to song processing relied on left temporal regions, including the superior temporal gyrus, whereas song processing compared to poem processing recruited more right temporal areas, including Heschl's gyrus and the superior temporal gyrus. PSA values co-varied with activation in bilateral temporal regions for poems, and in right-dominant fronto-temporal regions for songs. Continuous liking ratings were correlated with activity in the default mode network for both poems and songs. The pattern of results suggests that the neural processing of poems and their musical settings is based on their melodic properties, supported by bilateral temporal auditory areas and an additional right fronto-temporal network known to be implicated in the processing of melodies in songs. These findings take a middle ground in providing evidence for specific processing circuits for speech and music in the left and right hemisphere, but simultaneously for shared processing of melodic aspects of both poems and their musical settings in the right temporal cortex. Thus, we demonstrate the neurobiological plausibility of assuming the importance of melodic properties in spoken and sung aesthetic language alike, along with the involvement of the default mode network in the aesthetic appreciation of these properties.

The Distancing-Embracing model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception.

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positive and negative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories.

Negative emotions in art reception: Refining theoretical assumptions and adding variables to the Distancing-Embracing model.

While covering all commentaries, our response specifically focuses on the following issues: How can the hypothesis of emotional distancing (qua art framing) be compatible with stipulating high levels of felt negative emotions in art reception? Which concept of altogether pleasurable mixed emotions does our model involve? Can mechanisms of predictive coding, social sharing, and immersion enhance the power of our model?

Interface controls spontaneous crystallization in thin films of the ionic liquid [C2C1Im][OTf] on atomically clean Pd(111).

A total of 5-30 monolayer thick films of the ionic liquid (IL) [C2C1Im][OTf] were vaporized in vacuo onto an atomically clean Pd(111) single crystal surface at 220 K. Time- and temperature-resolved infrared reflection-absorption spectroscopy reveals growth, interactions with the metallic support, and the macroscopic phase behavior of the layer. At 220 K, the IL layer first grows in the form of a glassy phase. Crystallization of the IL was witnessed above a critical thickness of about 10 monolayers. On the basis of the known bulk crystal structure of the IL, we suggest the formation of well-oriented checkerboard-like crystalline film structures on the surface. The preferential orientation manifested by the crystal phase with regard to the macroscopic metallic surface is attributed to strong interactions between anionic headgroups and the metal.

Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction.

Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

Interactions of imidazolium-based ionic liquids with oxide surfaces controlled by alkyl chain functionalization.

From a different angle: Thin films of functionalized ionic liquids are deposited on cerium oxides following a surface science approach. The functionalization of the alkyl chain changes its orientation with respect to the surface plane from normal to parallel. This then leads to a different surface chemistry at higher temperatures.

Lay conceptions of "being moved" ("bewegt sein") include a joyful and a sad type: Implications for theory and research.

Being moved has received increased attention in emotion psychology as a social emotion that fosters bonds between individuals and within communities. This increased attention, however, has also sparked debates about whether the term "being moved" refers to a single distinct profile of emotion components or rather to a range of different emotion profiles. We addressed this question by investigating lay conceptions of the emotion components (i.e., elicitors, cognitive appraisals, subjective feelings, bodily symptoms, and consequences for thought/action) of "bewegt sein" (the German term for "being moved"). Participants (N = 106) provided written descriptions of both a moving personal experience and their conceptual prototype of "being moved," which were subjected to content analysis to obtain quantitative data for statistical analyses. Based on latent class analyses, we identified two classes for both the personal experiences (joyfully-moved and sadly-moved classes) and the being-moved prototype (basic-description and extended-description classes). Being joyfully moved occurred when social values and positive relationship experiences were salient. Being sadly moved was elicited by predominantly negative relationship experiences and negatively salient social values. For both classes, the most frequently reported consequences for thought/action were continued cognitive engagement, finding meaning, and increased valuation of and striving for connectedness/prosociality. Basic descriptions of the prototype included "being moved" by positive or negative events as instances of the same emotion, with participants in the extended-description class also reporting joy and sadness as associated emotions. Based on our findings and additional theoretical considerations, we propose that the term "being moved" designates an emotion with an overall positive valence that typically includes blends of positively and negatively valenced emotion components, in which especially the weight of the negative components varies. The emotion's unifying core is that it involves feeling the importance of individuals, social entities, and abstract social values as sources of meaning in one's life.

Surface-functionalized ionic liquid crystal-supported ionic liquid phase materials: ionic liquid crystals in mesopores.

The influence of confinement on the ionic liquid crystal (ILC) [C(18)C(1)Im][OTf] is studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), polarized optical microscopy (POM), and diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS). The ILC studied is supported on Si-based powders and glasses with pore sizes ranging from 11 to 50 nm. The temperature of the solid-to-liquid-crystalline phase transition seems mostly unaffected by the confinement, whereas the temperature of the liquid-crystalline-to-liquid phase transition is depressed for smaller pore sizes. A contact layer with a thickness in the order of 2 nm is identified. The contact layer exhibits a phase transition at a temperature 30 K lower than the solid-to-liquid-crystalline phase transition observed for the neat ILC. For applications within the "supported ionic liquid phase (SILP)" concept, the experiments show that in pores of diameter 50 nm a pore filling of α>0.4 is sufficient to reproduce the phase transitions of the neat ILC.

Dimensions and Clusters of Aesthetic Emotions: A Semantic Profile Analysis.

Aesthetic emotions are elicited by different sensory impressions generated by music, visual arts, literature, theater, film, or nature scenes. Recently, the AESTHEMOS scale has been developed to facilitate the empirical assessment of such emotions. In this article we report a semantic profile analysis of aesthetic emotion terms that had been used for the development of this scale, using the GRID approach. This method consists of obtaining ratings of emotion terms on a set of meaning facets (features) which represent five components of the emotion process (appraisal, bodily reactions, action tendencies, expression, and feelings). The aims here were (a) to determine the dimensionality of the GRID features when applied to aesthetic emotions and compare it to published results for emotion terms in general, and (b) to examine the internal organization of the domain of aesthetic emotion terms in order to identify salient clusters of these items based on the similarity of their feature profiles on the GRID. Exploratory Principal Component Analyses suggest a four-dimensional structure of the semantic space consisting of valence, power, arousal, and novelty, converging with earlier GRID studies on large sets of standard emotion terms. Using cluster analyses, 15 clusters of aesthetic emotion terms with similar GRID feature profiles were identified, revealing the internal organization of the aesthetic emotion terms domain and meaningful subgroups of aesthetic emotions. While replication for further languages is required, these findings provide a solid basis for further research and methodological development in the realm of aesthetic emotions.

Aesthetic emotions are a key factor in aesthetic evaluation: Reply to Skov and Nadal (2020).

Our theoretical model (Menninghaus et al., 2019) defines aesthetic emotions by reference to their role in aesthetic evaluation, and specifically as being predictive of aesthetic liking/disliking. Skov and Nadal (2020) dismiss the construct of "aesthetic emotions" as a "dated supposition" adopted from a "speculative" tradition and assert that there are no such emotions. Accordingly, they question all pieces of empirical evidence we referred to as supporting our model. In our response, we rebut these objections point by point and defend as well as expand the empirical evidence in support of our model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Do perceived context pictures automatically activate their phonological code?

Morsella and Miozzo (Morsella, E., & Miozzo, M. (2002). Evidence for a cascade model of lexical access in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 555-563) have reported that the to-be-ignored context pictures become phonologically activated when participants name a target picture, and took this finding as support for cascaded models of lexical retrieval in speech production. In a replication and extension of their experiment in German, we failed to obtain priming effects from context pictures phonologically related to a to-be-named target picture. By contrast, corresponding context words (i.e., the names of the respective pictures) and the same context pictures, when used in an identity condition, did reliably facilitate the naming process. This pattern calls into question the generality of the claim advanced by Morsella and Miozzo that perceptual processing of pictures in the context of a naming task automatically leads to the activation of corresponding lexical-phonological codes.

Beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness compared.

Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.

What are aesthetic emotions?

This is the first comprehensive theoretical article on aesthetic emotions. Following Kant's definition, we propose that it is the first and foremost characteristic of aesthetic emotions to make a direct contribution to aesthetic evaluation/appreciation. Each aesthetic emotion is tuned to a special type of perceived aesthetic appeal and is predictive of the subjectively felt pleasure or displeasure and the liking or disliking associated with this type of appeal. Contrary to the negativity bias of classical emotion catalogues, emotion terms used for aesthetic evaluation purposes include far more positive than negative emotions. At the same time, many overall positive aesthetic emotions encompass negative or mixed emotional ingredients. Appraisals of intrinsic pleasantness, familiarity, and novelty are preeminently important for aesthetic emotions. Appraisals of goal relevance/conduciveness and coping potential are largely irrelevant from a pragmatic perspective, but in some cases highly relevant for cognitive and affective coping. Aesthetic emotions are typically sought and savored for their own sake, with subjectively felt intensity and/or emotional arousal being rewards in their own right. The expression component of aesthetic emotions includes laughter, tears, and facial and bodily movements, along with applause or booing and words of praise or blame. Aesthetic emotions entail motivational approach and avoidance tendencies, specifically, tendencies toward prolonged, repeated, or interrupted exposure and wanting to possess aesthetically pleasing objects. They are experienced across a broad range of experiential domains and not coextensive with art-elicited emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language.

Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music--autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values--, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.

The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles.

It is a common experience-and well established experimentally-that music can engage us emotionally in a compelling manner. The mechanisms underlying these experiences are receiving increasing scrutiny. However, the extent to which other domains of aesthetic experience can similarly elicit strong emotions is unknown. Using psychophysiology, neuroimaging and behavioral responses, we show that recited poetry can act as a powerful stimulus for eliciting peak emotional responses, including chills and objectively measurable goosebumps that engage the primary reward circuitry. Importantly, while these responses to poetry are largely analogous to those found for music, their neural underpinnings show important differences, specifically with regard to the crucial role of the nucleus accumbens. We also go beyond replicating previous music-related studies by showing that peak aesthetic pleasure can co-occur with physiological markers of negative affect. Finally, the distribution of chills across the trajectory of poems provides insight into compositional principles of poetry.

Measuring aesthetic emotions: A review of the literature and a new assessment tool.

Aesthetic perception and judgement are not merely cognitive processes, but also involve feelings. Therefore, the empirical study of these experiences requires conceptualization and measurement of aesthetic emotions. Despite the long-standing interest in such emotions, we still lack an assessment tool to capture the broad range of emotions that occur in response to the perceived aesthetic appeal of stimuli. Elicitors of aesthetic emotions are not limited to the arts in the strict sense, but extend to design, built environments, and nature. In this article, we describe the development of a questionnaire that is applicable across many of these domains: the Aesthetic Emotions Scale (Aesthemos). Drawing on theoretical accounts of aesthetic emotions and an extensive review of extant measures of aesthetic emotions within specific domains such as music, literature, film, painting, advertisements, design, and architecture, we propose a framework for studying aesthetic emotions. The Aesthemos, which is based on this framework, contains 21 subscales with two items each, that are designed to assess the emotional signature of responses to stimuli's perceived aesthetic appeal in a highly differentiated manner. These scales cover prototypical aesthetic emotions (e.g., the feeling of beauty, being moved, fascination, and awe), epistemic emotions (e.g., interest and insight), and emotions indicative of amusement (humor and joy). In addition, the Aesthemos subscales capture both the activating (energy and vitality) and the calming (relaxation) effects of aesthetic experiences, as well as negative emotions that may contribute to aesthetic displeasure (e.g., the feeling of ugliness, boredom, and confusion).

Phonological activation of category coordinates during speech planning is observable in children but not in adults: evidence for cascaded processing.

There is a long-standing debate in the area of speech production on the question of whether only words selected for articulation are phonologically activated (as maintained by serial-discrete models) or whether this is also true for their semantic competitors (as maintained by forward-cascading and interactive models). Past research has addressed this issue by testing whether retrieval of a target word (e.g., cat) affects--or is affected by--the processing of a word that is phonologically related to a semantic category coordinate of the target (e.g., doll, related to dog) and has consistently failed to obtain such mediated effects in adult speakers. The authors present a series of experiments demonstrating that mediated effects are present in children (around age 7) and diminish with increasing age. This observation provides further evidence for cascaded models of lexical retrieval.

Towards a psychological construct of being moved.

The emotional state of being moved, though frequently referred to in both classical rhetoric and current language use, is far from established as a well-defined psychological construct. In a series of three studies, we investigated eliciting scenarios, emotional ingredients, appraisal patterns, feeling qualities, and the affective signature of being moved and related emotional states. The great majority of the eliciting scenarios can be assigned to significant relationship and critical life events (especially death, birth, marriage, separation, and reunion). Sadness and joy turned out to be the two preeminent emotions involved in episodes of being moved. Both the sad and the joyful variants of being moved showed a coactivation of positive and negative affect and can thus be ranked among the mixed emotions. Moreover, being moved, while featuring only low-to-mid arousal levels, was experienced as an emotional state of high intensity; this applied to responses to fictional artworks no less than to own-life and other real, but media-represented, events. The most distinctive findings regarding cognitive appraisal dimensions were very low ratings for causation of the event by oneself and for having the power to change its outcome, along with very high ratings for appraisals of compatibility with social norms and self-ideals. Putting together the characteristics identified and discussed throughout the three studies, the paper ends with a sketch of a psychological construct of being moved.

Being moved: linguistic representation and conceptual structure.

This study explored the organization of the semantic field and the conceptual structure of moving experiences by investigating German-language expressions referring to the emotional state of being moved. We used present and past participles of eight psychological verbs as primes in a free word-association task, as these grammatical forms place their conceptual focus on the eliciting situation and on the felt emotional state, respectively. By applying a taxonomy of basic knowledge types and computing the Cognitive Salience Index, we identified joy and sadness as key emotional ingredients of being moved, and significant life events and art experiences as main elicitors of this emotional state. Metric multidimensional scaling analyses of the semantic field revealed that the core terms designate a cluster of emotional states characterized by low degrees of arousal and slightly positive valence, the latter due to a nearly balanced representation of positive and negative elements in the conceptual structure of being moved.

On the flexibility of grammatical advance planning during sentence production: Effects of cognitive load on multiple lexical access.

Three picture-word interference experiments addressed the question of whether the scope of grammatical advance planning in sentence production corresponds to some fixed unit or rather is flexible. Subjects produced sentences of different formats under varying amounts of cognitive load. When speakers described 2-object displays with simple sentences of the form "the frog is next to the mug," the 2 nouns were found to be lexically-semantically activated to similar degrees at speech onset, as indexed by similarly sized interference effects from semantic distractors related to either the first or the second noun. When speakers used more complex sentences (including prenominal color adjectives; e.g., "the blue frog is next to the blue mug") much larger interference effects were observed for the first than the second noun, suggesting that the second noun was lexically-semantically activated before speech onset on only a subset of trials. With increased cognitive load, introduced by an additional conceptual decision task and variable utterance formats, the interference effect for the first noun was increased and the interference effect for second noun disappeared, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had been narrowed. By contrast, if cognitive load was induced by a secondary working memory task to be performed during speech planning, the interference effect for both nouns was increased, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had not been affected. In all, the data suggest that the scope of advance planning during grammatical encoding in sentence production is flexible, rather than structurally fixed.