19. August 2009 by John Schinnerer.

As you know, I write occasionally about the effect of music on our mood and emotions. Here is a wonderful, bouncy song by Great Big Sea that has a strong chance of lifting your spirits, buoying your mood and making you smile. It doesn’t get much better. Enjoy!

A Wonderful Wednesday to You All!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Positive Psychology Coach, Entrepreneur, Author, Radio Show Personality, National Keynote Speaker

Posted in Hope, Music psychology, Emotion & learning, Danville CA, Resiliency, Positive mood music, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide to Self, Emotional IQ, Happiness, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

10. August 2009 by John Schinnerer.

The human brain comes preconfigured for music, specifically the pentatonic scale. Music has a powerful sway over our momentary emotions, our longer-lasting moods and the thoughts that spring forth in unison with them.

This wiring for music appears to exist throughout the world despite the facts that some musical scales vary by culture.

Enjoy!

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Music and psychology

Posted in Danville CA, Music psychology, Emotional mind, Guide to Self, Dr. John Schinnerer | Print | No Comments »

6. July 2009 by John Schinnerer.

More and more, advances in technology are enabling emotion-sensing technologies with greater sophistication and accuracy. While software has monitored voices for agitation and pacing of voice in call centers for some time, we are nearing an age of gadgets that sense our moods, emotions, degree of agitation, stress, depression, and more.

Imagine your car sensing you are getting highly frustrated in a traffic jam, so the GPS suggests an alternative route with less traffic.

Picture an entertainment center that reads cues of depression and adjusts your entertainment to pick up your mood (e..g, changing the channel from drama to comedy).

Think of an iPhone that measures galvanic skin response (perspiration) and alters your playlist to calm you down when you show sign of stress or anger.

Computer programs are able to correctly identify the six universal emotions (via Ekman) at a rate of 88%. The average human correctly identifies the same emotions at roughly 49% (slightly less than pure chance).

 So how does the thought of emotion-sensing robots or computer gadgets make you feel?

Think about it from a perspective of interest and curiosity.

Then think about it from a feeling of paranoia and fear.

You may arrive at two completely separate conclusions based simply on your emotional starting point.

Here is the complete story from New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.400-emotional-robots-will-we-love-them-or-hate-them.html?full=true

Cheers,

Dr. John Schinnerer

Positive Psychology Coach and  Author

www.GuideToSelf.com

Posted in The human brain, Emotional mind, Music psychology, Curiosity, Emotion and technology, Depression, Unique marketing research, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide to Self, Emotional IQ, Innovative brand research, Measuring emotions | Print | No Comments »

29. June 2009 by John Schinnerer.

Dr. John Schinnerer

Guide To Self, Inc.

June 30, 2009

As I write this article, I am listening to the new Black Eyed Peas song, ‘I Gotta Feeling’, which begins with the lyrics,

‘I gotta feeling that tonight’s gonna be a good night,

tonight’s gonna be a good night,

tonight’s gonna be a good, good night.’

 The song makes me feel optimistic, energizes me, and gives me hope. This begs the question, how do music lyrics prime the mind to receive and interpret information?

Hundreds of studies have shown that words powerfully influence thinking, behavior, and mood, and much of it occurs without conscious awareness. Favorite songs are listened to over and over hundreds or thousands of times so it makes good sense to speculate that music lyrics may have a profound impact on the listener’s perception of the world, other people, and which emotions are experienced as well as the frequency of those emotions.

In psychology, researchers are beginning to grasp the significance of the workings of the mind beyond the conscious experience. Conscious awareness is merely the jumping off point when exploring the mind. There is now considerable agreement among neuroscientists that most cognitive processing takes place outside of conscious awareness. Roughly 90-95% of mental activity occurs outside conscious awareness. Much of this ‘back office’ activity is automatic and emotional. Much of this activity is taking place just below the level of our awareness.

Despite the lack of awareness, subconscious activity has a tremendous impact on how the world is perceived through the senses, day-to-day behaviors, emotions felt and satisfaction with life. For example, numerous studies have been done on the phenomenon known as priming. Priming is when a person is exposed to certain stimulus, such as words, lyrics, or surroundings, and their subconscious mind is activated. Once activated, the person tends to act in ways that are consistent with the stimulus without awareness of why they are behaving in that manner.  Priming has been shown to influence behavior in dramatic ways. Let me explain these types of studies by way of example. Imagine you volunteered for the following experiment:

You are given four jumbled sentences by a researcher who tells you to come get her when you’ve finished unscrambling them (so that the sentences are meaningful).  There is one extra word in each sentence does not need to be used.  For instance, you may be presented with something such as …‘her  interrupt   bother  usually  they’ As the subject, you would translate this mess into something meaningful such as… ‘They usually interrupt her’ or ‘They usually bother her.’ A few minutes later, you finish the task of unscrambling the four sentences and walk down the hallway to find the researcher. You find her but she’s in the midst of a conversation with a stranger and isn’t paying any attention to you. What do you do?

For those people who unscrambled sentences which contained one word per sentence having to do with rude behavior, such as ‘rash,’ ‘aggressive,’ ‘bother,’ and ‘intrude,’ you are far more likely to interrupt the researcher within 2 minutes and say, ‘Hey, I’m done. What’s next?’ On the other hand, if you unscrambled sentences in which the one rude word was swapped with a polite word such as ‘respect,’ ‘nice,’ or ‘courteous,’ the odds are that you will sit there passively for up to 10 minutes until the researcher finishes her conversation.  And you will have no idea what influenced you to be so docile. These experiments have been replicated over and over.

One experiment had a group of people simply read a list of words where some of the words had to do with stereotypes of elderly people, such as ‘retirement,’ ‘Florida,’ and ‘bald.’  Sure enough, participants who were ‘primed’ with elderly-related words instantly began acting consistent with the elderly stereotype. They walked more slowly down the hallway, they walked with their shoulders slightly more hunched over, and their short-term memory became worse than the control group.  Merely reading the list with words related to old age led to forgetfulness and other behavioral changes.

The frightening thing about these experiments is that the group given the words related to elderly stereotypes could not remember any words about the elderly in the original list of words. So they were influenced by the words and then forgot all about what it was that influenced them. All of this groundwork brings me to the latest research, which came out June 25, 2009, demonstrating that song lyrics prime behavior as well. When asked to fill in the missing song lyrics for different songs, participants’ behaviors and attitudes changed in startling ways.

Donald Saucier at Kansas State University found that when people filled in the lyrics for patriotic songs, such as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ they became more close-minded, prejudiced and less empathetic. They did not put themselves in the shoes of another person to view the world through different eyes.

What’s more, when folks filled in lyrics to songs such as ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’, they became more pro-social, reporting more accepting attitudes towards other people and more empathy. The hypothesis is that this is due to the strong association most people have with such childhood songs to happiness or contentment in their own childhood.

In conclusion, musical lyrics have an impact on attitudes towards others, emotions felt and how frequently they are experienced, and how the world is perceived. Given the research, it makes sense to closely look at the lyrics of the songs you listen to frequently. They may be impacting you more than you ever realized.  To this end, I have created a list of over 600 songs which support and augment pro-social behaviors based on the latest findings of positive psychology. If you’d like a complimentary copy, pick it up at  http://tinyurl.com/n2dtsn.

About the Author

Dr. John Schinnerer

Dr. John Schinnerer is in private practice helping clients learn anger management, stress management, the latest ways to deal with destructive negative emotions and ways to cultivate positive emotions such as love, curiosity and contentment. His practice is located in the Danville-San Ramon Medical Center at 913 San Ramon Valley Blvd., #280, Danville, California 94526. He graduated summa cum laude from U.C. Berkeley with a Ph.D. in psychology. Dr. Schinnerer has been an executive and psychologist for over 12 years. Dr. John Schinnerer is President and Founder of Guide To Self, a company that coaches clients to achieve optimal human functioning using the latest in positive psychology, mindfulness and attentional control. Dr. John Schinnerer hosted over 200 episodes of Guide To Self Radio, a prime time radio show, in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Dr. John Schinnerer sits on the Advisory Board of Positive Music Imperative as well as consults with Resonance Technologies around the latest ways to measure and quantify human emotions for commercial application. Dr. Schinnerer is President of Infinet Assessment, a psychological testing company to help firms select the best applicants. Dr. Schinnerer’s areas of expertise range from positive psychology, to emotional awareness, to moral development, to sports psychology. Dr. Schinnerer wrote the award-winning, “Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide To Managing Emotion and Thought,” which is available at Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and AuthorHouse.com.  

Posted in Hope, Resiliency, Awareness, Music psychology, Curiosity, The human brain, Subconscious mind, Dr. John Schinnerer, Guide to Self, Happiness, Positive mood music, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »

23. June 2009 by John Schinnerer.

“The Music Instinct: Science & Song.” Show time is 9 PM on June 24th.

From PBS…

While listening to music, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, asks the questions “where do goose bumps come from?” and “what’s going on in my brain that allows the goosebumps to happen?” Levitin leads a group of researchers as they investigate music’s fundamental physical structure; its biological, emotional and psychological impact; its brain altering and healing powers and its role in human evolution. The Music Instinct: Science and Song, a fascinating two-hour documentary on the science of music, premieres Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

The Music Instinct: Science and Song is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers.

Researchers and scientists from a variety of fields are using groundbreaking techniques that reveal startling new connections between music and the human mind, the body and the universe. Together with an array of musicians from rock and rap to jazz and classical, they are putting music under the microscope.

“The brain is teaching us about music and music is teaching us about the brain,” says Levitin.” Music allows us to understand better how the brain organizes information in the world. There are a lot of different factors that go into our emotional appreciation of music [like] the memories we have of a particular song that we heard at a particular time in our lives.”

Internationally renowned performers Bobby McFerrin and cellist Yo-Yo Ma describe the way musical intervals are used or combined to create melody and harmony. McFerrin, together with the “World Singers,” sing a cappella to demonstrate that basic elements of music; pitch, tempo, rhythm and melody create specific reactions in our brains. Yo-Yo Ma plays two notes and then five more notes and then plays different combinations that demonstrate the way musical intervals are combined to create a melody or harmony.

More info below at PBS

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/about/

Posted in Emotional management, Music psychology, Positive mood music, Happiness, Dr. John Schinnerer, Creativity, Positive Psychology | Print | No Comments »