The listener's temperament and perceived tempo and loudness of music

Ballroom dancers exhibit a dispositional need for arousal and elevated cerebral cortical activity during preferred melodic recall

Background

Although the association of human temperament and preference has been studied previously, few investigations have examined cerebral cortical activation to assess brain dynamics associated with the motivation to engage in performance. The present study adopted a personality and cognitive neuroscience approach to investigate if participation in ballroom dancing is associated with sensation-seeking temperament and elevated cerebral cortical arousal during freely chosen musical recall.

Methods

Preferred tempo, indicated by tapping speed during melodic recall, and a measure of fundamental disposition or temperament were assessed in 70 ballroom dancers and 71 nondancers. All participants completed a trait personality inventory (i.e., the Chen Huichang 60 Temperaments Inventory) to determine four primary types: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. Participants separately recalled their favorite musical piece and tapped to it with their index finger for 40 beats using a computer keyboard. A subset of 59 participants (29 ballroom dancers and 30 nondancers) also repeated the same tapping task while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded.

Results

The results revealed that the dancers were more extraverted, indicative of a heightened need for arousal, exhibited a preference for faster musical tempo, and exhibited elevated EEG beta power during the musical recall task relative to nondancers. Paradoxically, dancers also showed elevated introversion (i.e., melancholic score) relative to nondancers, which can be resolved by consideration of interactional personality theory if one assumes reasonably that dance performance environment is perceived in a stimulating manner.

Conclusion

The results are generally consistent with arousal theory, and suggest that ballroom dancers seek elevated stimulation and, thereby, choose to engage with active and energetic rhythmic auditory stimulation, thus providing the nervous system with the requisite stimulation for desired arousal. These results also suggest an underlying predisposition for engagement in ballroom dance and support the gravitational hypothesis, which propose that personality traits and perception lead to the motivation to engage in specific forms of human performance.

Twin-peak effect in both cardiac response and tempo of popular music

How the musical tempo affects the performance of heart rate variability (HRV) was studied in this work. By understanding the relationship between the HRV response and the music tempo with decreasing tempo from 140 to 70 beats per minute (bpm) periodically in six successive weeks. There were two groups in the experiment, one was listening drum loop music 3 minutes in the middle of experiment and the other was just rest for 20 minutes. After the processed the information from the objects, the distribution of difference of HRV response between before and after listening various tempo drum loop was similar to the distribution of modern popular music in tempo. Both distributions have the twin peaks about 70-85 and 110-125 bpm.

“The Princess and the Pea”

The paper concerns sensory sensitivity (SS), a formal characteristic of behavior Strelau introduced in his regulative theory of temperament (RTT). SS is the ability to react to sensory stimuli of low stimulatory value. It contributes to the regulation of stimulation by setting thresholds for the stimulatory input an individual is able to react to. Strelau’s recognition of the orthogonal character of SS and emotional reactivity is the strength of the theoretical concept of SS. However, this approach fails to give the multimodality of sensory perception and the relationship of SS to attention sufficient consideration. References to other theories of sensitivity and the relevant empirical findings shed light on the theoretical and functional value of Strelau’s concept of SS. Both the theory and the corresponding SS scale in the Formal Characteristics of Behavior – Temperament Inventory (FCB-TI) reveal certain weaknesses. This paper presents a critical approach to both the theoretical approach to SS in the RTT and its operationalization. It gives suggestions for the revision of the theoretical construct of SS and of its psychometric measure. Recognizing the multiple sense-specific sensitivities would transform the concept of SS into a configuration of modality-specific sensitivities and produce an individual sensitivity profile.

What Do Music Preferences Reveal About Personality?

The present study is the first to examine the relationship between music preferences and personality among a sample of young Germans (N = 422, age range 21–26 years). We replicated the factor structure of the Short Test of Music Preferences (STOMP, Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003 ) by means of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The validity of the STOMP was also confirmed for the first time by rating soundclips. The relationship between the dimensions of personality (Big Five Inventory) and music preferences (STOMP and soundclips) was analyzed with a structural equation model (SEM). Gender differences were examined with multigroup analyses (MGA). Our findings corroborate earlier findings on the relationship between music preferences and personality: Individuals open to experience prefer reflective and complex music (e.g., classical) and intense and rebellious music (e.g., rock), whereas they dislike upbeat and conventional types of music (e.g., pop music). Extraverts, on the other hand, prefer upbeat and conventional and energetic and rhythmic types of music (e.g., rap/hip-hop). The results reveal some gender differences.