S.O.T.T: Universal emotions like anger, sadness and happiness are expressed nearly the same in both music and movement across cultures, according to new research. The researchers found that when Dartmouth undergraduates and members of a remote Cambodian hill tribe were asked to use sliding bars to adjust traits such as the speed, pitch, or regularity of music, they used the same types of characteristics to express primal emotions. What's more, the same types of patterns were used to express the same emotions in animations of movement in both cultures. "The kinds of dynamics you find in movement, you find also in music and they're used in the same way to provide the same kind of meaning," said study co-author Thalia Wheatley, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth University. The findings suggest music's intense power may lie in the fact it is processed by ancient brain circuitry used to read emotion in our movement.
...read more>>>...
