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Tone deaf miss speech nuances
People who are tone deaf may have difficulty picking up nuances like anger, fear or sarcasm in everyday speech, according to new Australian research.
Macquarie University psychology professor Bill Thompson says people who can't hear music accurately - amusics - may also miss out on the subtle shades of meaning conveyed by a person's tone of voice.
The findings will be presented at a music science conference in Sydney.
"It is possible that somebody who is completely tone deaf might not pick up that somebody they're talking to is getting increasingly irritable," Prof Thompson told AAP.
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The study found tone deaf individuals also had "dramatic" difficulties decoding emotions such as fear and irritation.
"It kind of makes sense in a way because music communicates emotions through changes in pitch, changes in loudness and through its pace and timbre - all of the same qualities that communicate emotions in speech and tone of voice," he said.
Prof Thompson, who was presenting his paper on intonation insensitivity at the International Conference on Music Communication Science at the University of NSW, said tone of voice, or "speech prosody", can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
"For example if someone says `It's nice to see you', you don't know whether they're being sarcastic or if they're genuinely happy," he said.
Around four per cent of Australians exhibit congenital tone deafness, or "amusia". |
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Tone deaf miss speech nuances |
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Written by Administrator
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Tone deaf miss speech nuances
People who are tone deaf may have difficulty picking up nuances like anger, fear or sarcasm in everyday speech, according to new Australian research.
Macquarie University psychology professor Bill Thompson says people who can't hear music accurately - amusics - may also miss out on the subtle shades of meaning conveyed by a person's tone of voice.
The findings will be presented at a music science conference in Sydney.
"It is possible that somebody who is completely tone deaf might not pick up that somebody they're talking to is getting increasingly irritable," Prof Thompson told AAP.
advertisement
The study found tone deaf individuals also had "dramatic" difficulties decoding emotions such as fear and irritation.
"It kind of makes sense in a way because music communicates emotions through changes in pitch, changes in loudness and through its pace and timbre - all of the same qualities that communicate emotions in speech and tone of voice," he said.
Prof Thompson, who was presenting his paper on intonation insensitivity at the International Conference on Music Communication Science at the University of NSW, said tone of voice, or "speech prosody", can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
"For example if someone says `It's nice to see you', you don't know whether they're being sarcastic or if they're genuinely happy," he said.
Around four per cent of Australians exhibit congenital tone deafness, or "amusia". |
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Written by Administrator
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The dangers of smoking
cigarette butts
A Sydney University researcher is helping to alert people in the Asia Pacific region to the deadly impact of smoking.
Dr Rachel Huxley, acting director of the Nutrition and Lifestyle Division at the George Institute, says too few people in the region are aware of the dangers of smoking which is responsible for nine out of ten cases of lung cancer, three out of four cases of chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and one in four cases of coronary heart disease.
Public awareness has been raised in Australia, which, over the past few decades, has gone from having one of the highest rates of cigarette smoking in the world to one of the lowest. But in the wider region, especially in developing countries, the number of smokers is enormous - China alone has 320 million smokers, the vast majority of them men. Moreover, a recent report suggests that over 50 per cent of doctors in China smoke.
Dr Huxley has led an international research team - the Asia-Pacific Cohort Studies Collaboration (APCSC) - with more than 60 researchers from nine countries examining the impact of risk factors on cardiovascular disease. More than 650,000 people have contributed to the research from 44 studies in the Asia Pacific region since 1999.
The latest research findings indicate that the risk of dying from lung cancer among women who smoke is double that for men. But the study also reported good news for any smoker wishing to quit the habit: stopping smoking can reduce the risk of death from lung cancer by up to 70 per cent. |
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Fat, Fit and living longer |
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Written by Web master
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Obese and overweight people can live as long as those with a normal weight. The question is, how disabled will they be?
There's some good news and some not so good news for the overweight and obese.
First the good news. Obese people are likely to live as long as people of normal weight – as long as they're fit. That's the finding of US researchers who studied 2,603 people in their sixties and older over a 12-year period.
Participants were measured for body weight, waist size and body mass index. (Body mass index, or BMI, is a figure calculated by dividing weight in kg by height in metres squared. Normal is 20 to 25; over 30 indicates obesity.) Each person had a battery of medical tests. They also underwent treadmill exercise testing to see how fit they were.
It turned out that those who were most fit were much less likely to have diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. And they were much more likely to be alive at the end of the study. Death rates for those at the highest fitness levels were less than half that of those at the lowest fitness levels.
But here's the interesting finding: among people who were fit, survival rates were similar for normal weight, overweight, and obese people.
In other words, a person's weight didn't affect their survival rates, but fitness levels did. The conclusion: if a person is overweight, they'll live as long as anyone else with a normal weight, as long as they're fit.
Older, but disabled
Now for the not-so-good news. Other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, agree that obese people can live as long as people with a normal weight. They say that survival rates for obese people have increased markedly since the 1960s, which they put down to better medical treatments for the conditions associated with it. The problem is, there's a greater chance they'll be living with disabilities than people of normal weight. |
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