Month: September 2013

“In my experience, metal isn’t for angry people,” says Leah Sottile:

And that got me thinking: Is it possible that listening to angry music could make people happier? Do hours and years of loud riffs and screeching vocals pummeling your ear drums actually mellow you out?

It’s a theory backed up in a recent study conducted by Maya Tamir and Brett Ford, researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In one study, 175 people were asked to participate in role-playing exercises where they had to either confront a person—like a cop interrogating a suspect—or collaborate with someone. But before the role-playing began, the subjects were allowed to choose from a selection of music to aid in evoking the emotions they would need: Anger, happiness, or neutrality. It was up to them to choose what they wanted to hear. “Music is often used as a way to manipulate emotions, I just had people decide how to manipulate their own emotions,” Tamir says. The subjects were also asked questions about their emotional health, happiness, and feelings of social support.

It’s no novel idea that someone might choose to rev themselves up with aggressive music before a engaging in a tough task: A fourth quarter tie-breaker, a tense salary negotiation. And no surprise, the folks who chose angry music had no problem completing their tasks.

(Video: Judas Priest performs in 1982)

Marcia Hoffman worries that Apple’s fingerprint-ID iPhone will make it difficult for owners to invoke the right against self-incrimination. Why? Because while people can’t be forced to share information such as PINs, they can be compelled to provide fingerprints:

Take this hypothetical example coined by the Supreme Court: If the police demand that you give them the key to a lockbox that happens to contain incriminating evidence, turning over the key wouldn’t be testimonial if it’s just a physical act that doesn’t reveal anything you know. However, if the police try to force you to divulge the combination to a wall safe, your response would reveal the contents of your mind — and so would implicate the Fifth Amendment. (If you’ve written down the combination on a piece of paper and the police demand that you give it to them, that may be a different story.)

The important feature about PINs and passwords is that they’re generally something we know (unless we forget them, of course). These memory-based authenticators are the type of fact that benefit from strong Fifth Amendment protection should the government try to make us turn them over against our will. Indeed, last year a federal appeals court held that a man could not be forced by the government to decrypt data. But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics — things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember — the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply.

Recent Dish on biometric identification here and here.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah draws a distinction between the “pretty” and the “beautiful”:

I think Kant was right in that beauty is a word that belongs to sensation. It has to strike the senses, whether it’s the ear or the eye. And I think he was right in that it’s connected to pleasure in the sensory experience and the desire to return to the experience. But what is merely pleasurable is pretty. Beauty has an element of that thing that makes you want to come back, that engages you cognitively. It’s this combination of the power to attract the senses and then its being rewarding to think about the experience that you’re having that makes for real beauty.

(Photo by Martin Klimas. More from his “Rapid Bloom” series here.)

Christian Jarrett notes a new meta-analysis that indicates most mental health patients prefer psychotherapy to medication:

Kathryn McHugh and her colleagues identified 34 relevant peer-reviewed studies up to August 2011 involving 90,483 people, in which the participants were asked to indicate a straight preference between psychotherapy or drugs. Half the studies involved patients awaiting treatment, the others involved participants who were asked to indicate their preference if they were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. The researchers had hoped to study preferences among patients with a diverse range of diagnoses but they were restricted by the available literature – 65 per cent studies pertained to depression with the remainder mostly involving anxiety disorders.

Overall, 75 per cent of participants stated a preference for psychotherapy over drugs. Stated differently, participants were three times as likely to state that they preferred psychological treatment rather than medication. The preference for therapy remained but was slightly lower (69 per cent) when focusing just on treatment-seeking patients, and when focusing only on studies that looked at depression (70 per cent). Desire for psychotherapy was stronger in studies that involved more women or younger participants.

The Mystery of Flying Kicks is a short documentary that explores why, exactly, people toss sneakers over power lines (aka “shoefiti”):

A quick list of claims people make about what it actually means: A sign that someone has lost his virginity, a bullying tactic, a mafia signal to the police, code for where to buy drugs, a mark of gang territory, a tribute to fallen gang members, a graffiti-like practice to mark your street, “total bullshit,” a sign that, in a given neighborhood, “people can do whatever they feel like and there’s no recognition of law or decency,” something done by food-service employees when they graduate to a better job, or a way to get rid of old shoes that are too beat up to give away.