Happy social signals get a head start—even across the senses. Our new study shows that seeing a happy point-light walker or eye gaze directed to one side helps people respond faster to sounds coming from the same direction. 👀 😊 Modeling suggests this emerges early in processing.

This variability may be a previously underestimated source of the miscommunication that shows up so often in everyday conversation: How you say something may land completely differently depending on who's listening.

Furthermore, it became apparent that not everyone interpreted the features in the same way: People use pitch information differently, sometimes even in opposite ways from each other.

An interdisciplinary research team led by researchers from Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany has conducted a multi-stage study to find out which intonation features are crucial and if everyone perceives them the same way.

Prosody—the melody of speech—conveys meaning to what is said beyond the spoken words. Intonation, or changes in pitch, plays an important role in this process.

Nearly 1800 participants reported open-ended thoughts while listening to 120 excerpts of music. NLP analysis showed thought contents are jointly shaped by aspects of the music like genre and participant-level factors like age.

How does our environment impact our everyday, free-flowing thoughts? This study used music as a window into the factors that influence the content of these thoughts.

The experimental code is shared alongside the publication, allowing future replications.

Truth-telling may be more deeply shaped by the social deceptive context than often assumed, with implications for how we understand planning, control, and monitoring during verbal deception.

Across experiments: An additional analysis of typing duration revealed a dissociation. While lying took longer to initiate, truth-telling took longer to complete. This measure of response execution may reveal differences obscured in response times.

Exp. 3: When lie and truth were semantically related, lying was facilitated; it became faster. In contrast, semantic relatedness did not affect truth-telling, while it did affect instructed responses.

Exp. 2: Reducing memory load did not reveal a larger difference between lying and control responses. Both were affected similarly, suggesting that memory demands did not moderate the surprisingly small difference between lie and control responses.