Thinking about life in COVID-19: An exploratory study on the influence of temporal framing on streams-of-consciousness.

The COVID-19 global pandemic led to major upheavals in daily life. As a result, mental health has been negatively impacted for many, including college students who have faced increased stress, depression, anxiety, and social isolation. How we think about the future and adjust to such changes may be partly mediated by how we situate our experiences in relation to the pandemic. To test this idea, we investigate how temporal framing influences the way participants think about COVID life. In an exploratory study, we investigate the influence of thinking of life before versus during the pandemic on subsequent thoughts about post-pandemic life. Participants wrote about their lives in a stream-of-consciousness style paradigm, and the linguistic features of their thoughts are extracted using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Initial results suggest principal components of LIWC features can distinguish the two temporal framings just from the content of their post-pandemic-oriented texts alone. We end by discussing theoretical implications for our understanding of personal experience and self-generated narrative. We also discuss other aspects of the present data that may be useful for investigating these thought processes in the future, including document-level features, typing dynamics, and individual difference measures.

Laughter and culture.

Like most human non-verbal vocalizations, laughter is produced by speakers of all languages, across all known societies. But despite this obvious fact (or perhaps because of it), there is little comparative research examining the structural and functional similarity of laughter across speakers from different cultures. Here, we describe existing research examining (i) the perception of laughter across disparate cultures, (ii) conversation analysis examining how laughter manifests itself during discourse across different languages, and (iii) computational methods developed for automatically detecting laughter in spoken language databases. Together, these three areas of investigation provide clues regarding universals and cultural variations in laughter production and perception, and offer methodological tools that can be useful for future large-scale cross-cultural studies. We conclude by providing suggestions for areas of research and predictions of what we should expect to discover. Overall, we highlight how important questions regarding human vocal communication across cultures can be addressed through the examination of spontaneous and volitional laughter. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

Signals and cues of social groups.

A crucial factor in how we perceive social groups involves the signals and cues emitted by them. Groups signal various properties of their constitution through coordinated behaviors across sensory modalities, influencing receivers' judgments of the group and subsequent interactions. We argue that group communication is a necessary component of a comprehensive computational theory of social groups.

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures.

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.

Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies.

Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N = 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures.

Universality and diversity in human song.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

Quadri-stability of a spatially ambiguous auditory illusion.

In addition to vision, audition plays an important role in sound localization in our world. One way we estimate the motion of an auditory object moving towards or away from us is from changes in volume intensity. However, the human auditory system has unequally distributed spatial resolution, including difficulty distinguishing sounds in front vs. behind the listener. Here, we introduce a novel quadri-stable illusion, the Transverse-and-Bounce Auditory Illusion, which combines front-back confusion with changes in volume levels of a nonspatial sound to create ambiguous percepts of an object approaching and withdrawing from the listener. The sound can be perceived as traveling transversely from front to back or back to front, or "bouncing" to remain exclusively in front of or behind the observer. Here we demonstrate how human listeners experience this illusory phenomenon by comparing ambiguous and unambiguous stimuli for each of the four possible motion percepts. When asked to rate their confidence in perceiving each sound's motion, participants reported equal confidence for the illusory and unambiguous stimuli. Participants perceived all four illusory motion percepts, and could not distinguish the illusion from the unambiguous stimuli. These results show that this illusion is effectively quadri-stable. In a second experiment, the illusory stimulus was looped continuously in headphones while participants identified its perceived path of motion to test properties of perceptual switching, locking, and biases. Participants were biased towards perceiving transverse compared to bouncing paths, and they became perceptually locked into alternating between front-to-back and back-to-front percepts, perhaps reflecting how auditory objects commonly move in the real world. This multi-stable auditory illusion opens opportunities for studying the perceptual, cognitive, and neural representation of objects in motion, as well as exploring multimodal perceptual awareness.