No abstract

Psychological studies of poetry have focused on the responses to written text, and little is known on how choices made by reciters affect listeners’ responses. We hypothesized that syntax-compatible prosodic cues – pauses and pitch breaks – would increase preference by increasing comprehension. Participants rated different declamations of the same poem for preference and comprehension. The match between syntactic boundaries and linguistic prosody cues was quantified in each version, and then we tested how this match predicted listeners’ responses. Unlike our predictions, linguistic prosody had opposite effects on comprehension vs. preference: Comprehension was enhanced by using both sentence pauses and clause pitch breaks, while avoiding clause pauses. When controlling for comprehension, preference was enhanced by clause pauses but hampered by clause breaks and sentence pauses. Results are consistent with the possibility that listeners enjoyed losing track of syntactic boundaries, in line with the idea that deviation may lead to pleasure.

Prosociality improves with interpersonal synchronization—the temporal coordination of movement across individuals. We tested whether the benefits of interpersonal synchronization extend to temporary circumstances of induced frustration, where negative changes in prosociality are expected as a result. Participants performed two joint tasks—synchronization versus non-synchronization. Each task was performed twice, with high versus low induced frustration. After each joint task, prosociality was measured both with explicit tests, in which participants were aware of the test goal, and implicit ones, where they were less aware. Frustration levels per task were also reported. Results showed that increase in frustration led to decrease in implicit prosociality after the non-synchronization task, but not after synchronization, suggesting that interpersonal synchronization attenuates the antisocial outcomes of frustration. In addition, our study highlights the advantages of implicit measures of prosociality, among which the test we created (Interpersonal Trust Test) may stand as a useful resource in future experimental research.