To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature. The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary ...attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals. The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in which participants use a slider to reproduce heard auditory stimuli that vary along three important dimensions of timbre: envelope, spectral flux, and spectral centroid. With a sample of 95 participants, the TPT was calibrated and validated against measures of related abilities and examined for its reliability. The results indicate that a short-version (8 minutes) of the TPT has good explanatory support from a factor analysis model, acceptable internal reliability (
α
= .69, ωt = .70), good test–retest reliability (
r
= .79) and substantial correlations with self-reported general musical sophistication (
ρ
= .63) and pitch discrimination (
ρ
= .56), as well as somewhat lower correlations with duration discrimination (
ρ
= .27), and musical instrument discrimination abilities (
ρ
= .33). Overall, the TPT represents a robust tool to measure an individual’s timbre perception ability. Furthermore, the use of sliders to perform a reproductive task has shown to be an effective approach in threshold testing. The current version of the TPT is openly available for research purposes.
Previous studies have suggested that the prosocial effects which arise following synchrony during music and dance may serve as a mechanism for people to bond socially. However, other research has ...proposed that synchrony could be a mechanism for signalling coalition to demonstrate fitness, which is expressed by a group's ability to effectively cooperate. In the present studies, we compared these theories by showing participants realistic virtual avatars engaged in different forms of group dance and then examining their perceived social closeness and formidability of the dance groups. We conducted two studies to assess the perceptual influence of movement type (unison vs. coordinated) and movement quality (temporally aligned vs. temporally misaligned). We predicted that the difference in the ratings of closeness and formidability would only emerge when the groups align movements, and this was supported. We also hypothesised that unison movement would better signal formidability while coordinated movement would better signal a group's social closeness. However, unison movement yielded higher ratings than coordinated movement for both formidability and social closeness, suggesting that a group should move in complete synchrony to maximally indicate their fitness and social bonds.
•Groups perceived to be more closely bonded and formidable when movements temporally align.•Completely synchronised movement maximally indicates a group's social bonds and formidability.•Realistic virtual avatars better represent human movement than point-light-display.
The phenomenon of musical consonance is an essential feature in diverse musical styles. The traditional belief, supported by centuries of Western music theory and psychological studies, is that ...consonance derives from simple (harmonic) frequency ratios between tones and is insensitive to timbre. Here we show through five large-scale behavioral studies, comprising 235,440 human judgments from US and South Korean populations, that harmonic consonance preferences can be reshaped by timbral manipulations, even as far as to induce preferences for inharmonic intervals. We show how such effects may suggest perceptual origins for diverse scale systems ranging from the gamelan's slendro scale to the tuning of Western mean-tone and equal-tempered scales. Through computational modeling we show that these timbral manipulations dissociate competing psychoacoustic mechanisms underlying consonance, and we derive an updated computational model combining liking of harmonicity, disliking of fast beats (roughness), and liking of slow beats. Altogether, this work showcases how large-scale behavioral experiments can inform classical questions in auditory perception.
This study aims to examine the influence of supportive leadership and family social support for female managers on organizational effectiveness and test the mediating effect of positive spillover ...between work and family (PSWF). This study utilized data of 974 married female managers from the 6th Korean Female Manager Panel (KWMP) survey to analyze the relationship between the latent variables. Hypotheses of this study were tested using Structural Equation Model Analysis (SEM). This study found that supportive leadership and PSWF have a positive influence on female managers’ organizational effectiveness. However, family support had no significant effect on the organizational effectiveness of female managers. The analysis showed that supportive leadership and family social support positively influenced female manager’s PSWF. Also, PSWF mediated the relationship between family social support and organizational effectiveness as well as between supportive leadership and organizational effectiveness. This study provides a better understanding of PSWF as a mediator between family social support and organizational effectiveness. Contrary to previous studies that focused on the negative effects of work-family conflicts, this study highlighted the role of PSWF, justifying the need for governmental or organizational programs to increase PSWF.
We examine associations between prevailing weather conditions and music features in all available songs that reached the United Kingdom weekly top charts throughout a 67-year period (1953-2019), ...comprising 23 859 unique entries. We found that music features reflecting high intensity and positive emotions were positively associated with daily temperatures and negatively associated with rainfall, whereas music features reflecting low intensity and negative emotions were not related to weather conditions. These results held true after controlling for the mediating effects of year (temporal patterns) and month (seasonal patterns). However, music-weather associations were more nuanced than previously assumed by linear models, becoming only meaningful in those months and seasons when changes in weather were the most notable. Importantly, the observed associations depended on the popularity of the music: while songs in the top 10 of the charts exhibited the strongest associations with weather, less popular songs showed no relationship. This suggests that a song's fit with prevailing weather may be a factor pushing a song into the top of the charts. Our work extends previous research on non-musical domains (e.g. finance, crime, mental health) by showing that large-scale population-level preferences for cultural phenomena (music) are also influenced by broad environmental factors that exist over long periods of time (weather) via mood-regulation mechanisms. We discuss these results in terms of the limited nature of correlational studies and cross-cultural generalizability.
While interest in soft robotics as surgical tools has grown due to their inherently safe interactions with the body, their feasibility is limited in the amount of force that can be transmitted during ...procedures. This is especially apparent in minimally invasive procedures where millimeter‐scale devices are necessary for reaching the desired surgical site, such as in interventional bronchoscopy. To leverage the benefits of soft robotics in minimally invasive surgery, a soft robot with integrated tip steering, stabilization, and needle deployment capabilities is proposed for lung tissue biopsy procedures. Design, fabrication, and modeling of the force transmission of this soft robotic platform allow for integration into a system with a diameter of 3.5 mm. Characterizations of the soft robot are performed to analyze bending angle, force transmission, and expansion during needle deployment. In vitro experiments of both the needle deployment mechanism and fully integrated soft robot validate the proposed workflow and capabilities in a simulated surgical setting.
A soft robot with multiple integrated actuation mechanisms for steering, tip stabilization, and tissue puncturing is introduced to increase efficacy of peripheral lung biopsy in bronchoscopy procedures. The robot benefits from increased flexibility without sacrificing force transmission. Needle deployment from the robot tip facilitates puncture minimizing surgeon intervention. The proposed robot paves the way for more accurate, efficient biopsy procedures.
•Psychosocial stressors are common in adolescents patients with a history of EVALI, with 93 % of our patients included in this study reporting stressors.•The most common domains of psychosocial ...stressors reported were home/family stressors, polysubstance use, and mental health comorbidities.•On average, patients had stressors belonging to 4 different domains.•Clinicians should attempt to understand the narrative of psychosocial stressors, which may predate their lung injury, and offers a compelling reason for continued follow-up, counseling, and social work involvement.
Adolescent electronic cigarette (EC) use has reached epidemic rates and has been linked to numerous mental health and psychosocial stressors (PS). There is limited qualitative data on PS for adolescents with e-cigarette, or vaping, product-use associated lung injury (EVALI), a severe complication of EC use.
All patients hospitalized at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas from 2018 to 2022 and met CDC case definitions for EVALI were included in the analysis. PS were extracted from the electronic health record and analyzed for recurring themes using the HEADSS assessment as a framework. Results were summarized using descriptive statistics, and representative quotations were selected to highlight each theme.
Forty-three adolescents (mean age 16.3 years; 62.8 % male; 39.5 % Non-Hispanic White, 60.5 % Hispanic) were included in the analysis, and 40 (93 %) reported PS. The most common themes were family (51 %; “restraining order issued against 28-year-old brother”), polysubstance use (77 %; “experimenting with…ecstasy, LSD, CCC, misusing Adderall”), and mental health (63 %; “has been suicidal since he was ‘a toddler’”). Less commonly, patients reported PS related to peers (28 %; “spending the entire day at the cemetery where his best friend was buried”), school (49 %; “attending his second alternative school”), and the legal system (19 %; “placed in juvenile detention, released, and will be on probation”).
Adolescents with EVALI had PS that were chronic, severe, and involving multiple domains. These findings emphasize the importance of psychosocial screening in adolescents and coordinating interdisciplinary care with mental health and social services.
Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural regularities and ...diversities in human song are thought to emerge from this transmission process, but testing how underlying mechanisms contribute to musical structures remains a key challenge. Here, we introduce an automatic online pipeline that streamlines large-scale cultural transmission experiments using a sophisticated and naturalistic modality: singing. We quantify the evolution of 3,424 melodies orally transmitted across 1,797 participants in the United States and India. This approach produces a high-resolution characterization of how oral transmission shapes melody, revealing the emergence of structures that are consistent with widespread musical features observed cross-culturally (small pitch sets, small pitch intervals, and arch-shaped melodic contours). We show how the emergence of these structures is constrained by individual biases in our participants—vocal constraints, working memory, and cultural exposure—which determine the size, shape, and complexity of evolving melodies. However, their ultimate effect on population-level structures depends on social dynamics taking place during cultural transmission. When participants recursively imitate their own productions (individual transmission), musical structures evolve slowly and heterogeneously, reflecting idiosyncratic musical biases. When participants instead imitate others’ productions (social transmission), melodies rapidly shift toward homogeneous structures, reflecting shared structural biases that may underpin cross-cultural variation. These results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of how human song structures emerge via cultural transmission.
•Online singing experiments enable large-scale music evolution studies•Vocal, cognitive, and cultural factors cause oral transmission biases•Transmission biases cause the emergence of diverse musical structures•Social factors amplify or attenuate transmission biases
Anglada-Tort et al. use online singing experiments to study oral transmission mechanisms in US and Indian participants. The results show how individual participant biases—vocal, cognitive, and cultural—shape the evolution of musical structures but that social biases are crucial for determining differences and similarities in resulting structures.
Introduction
E‐cigarette, or vaping, product use‐associated lung injury (EVALI) results from inhaling the aerosol of e‐cigarettes and has similar clinical features to coronavirus disease 2019 ...(COVID‐19). EVALI case counts since the declaration of the COVID‐19 pandemic is unknown.
Methods
A retrospective electronic health record chart review of adolescents hospitalized at one institution with EVALI was conducted. Clinical characteristics and hospital course of patients hospitalized during the pandemic were compared to those prepandemic.
Results
The clinical presentation of adolescents hospitalized prior‐to (n = 19) and during the COVID‐19 pandemic (n = 22) were similar with respect to constitutional, respiratory, and gastrointestinal symptoms. All patients hospitalized during the pandemic were tested for COVID‐19 at least once. Only one patient had a positive SARS‐CoV‐2 RT‐PCR test result. Thirty‐one out of 39 patients treated with corticosteroids had clinical improvement within 24 h (79%). Patients hospitalized during the pandemic had a shorter median length of stay (5 vs. 7 days, p < 0.01), and were less often discharged with home oxygen (1 vs. 6 patients, p = 0.04). Pulmonary function tests improved pre‐ to postcorticosteroid treatment and postcorticosteroid to follow‐up.
Conclusions
Eliciting a history of vaping in adolescents presenting with constitutional, respiratory, and gastrointestinal symptoms is important to identify EVALI cases, which have continued throughout the COVID‐19 pandemic. A shorter length of stay with less need for mechanical ventilation and home oxygen in adolescents hospitalized during the pandemic may reflect increased familiarity with EVALI characteristics. Corticosteroids led to clinical and pulmonary function improvement.
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