psychology

Does Good Need Memorable?

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Psychology Professor Siu-Lan Tan outdoors
Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan

BuzzFeed’s Reggie Ugwu wrote an explication of a new vocal phenomenon he calls “Indie Pop Voice” (“Selena Gomez’s ’Good for You’ and the Rise of the ’Indie Pop Voice’”). The trend refers to many singers’ creative reshaping of vowel sounds. But why do that?

To arrive at a more comprehensive answer to that question, Reggie turned to Kalamazoo College’s Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan, who also posts a blog (“What Shapes Film”) for Psychology Today online. Siu-Lan expands on Reggie’s question in her “Six Reasons Pop Singers Pronounce Some Lyrics in Odd Ways: ’Secret Asian Man’ and Other Mysteries of Song.” The reasons range from the more prosaic “making a song one’s own” to the wonderfully poetic “tightening or relaxing one’s lips or throat to change the tone color of your voice.” How cool is the fact that a voice has tone colors!

According to Siu-Lan it’s vowels that make the song, so those might be re-shaped in any number of ways for any number of reasons. Consonants, on the other hand, are flow-stoppers and are therefore emphasized…or omitted entirely…depending on the effect a singer desires. (That’s why Siu-Lan for some time thought Johnny Rivers was singing about a secret Asian man rather than a “Secret Agent Man”). Both Reggie and Siu-Lan cite the desire to be more interesting or catchy—“good” needs “memorable,” according to Reggie. Okay, agrees Siu-Lan, but be careful. Too much “capital-M Memorable” via pronunciation deviation carries some risk—such as a feeling of contrived affectation or garbled words. You especially don’t want the latter if the lyric’s magic.

Here’s another question Reggie or some other inquirer might one day ask: Why’s a top notch psychology professor weighing in on independent pop music? “Although as an academic I spend most of my time on scholarly works, I think bringing what we do to the public is also important,” says Siu-Lan. “Technical aspects of singing include articulators and resonators and formants. But when applied to Selena Gomez and Top 40 pop singers, we can make the basic ideas relevant to the general public—and perhaps make them aware of some more nuances involved in singing.”

Kalamazoo College alumni Annie Gough ’15 and Eric Silverstein ’14 selected as Challenge Detroit Fellows

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Kalamazoo College alumna Annie Gough
Annie Gough ’15

Kalamazoo College alumni, Annie Gough ’15 and Eric Silverstein ’14 have been selected as two of 30 Fellows to participate in Challenge Detroit, an urban revitalization program focused on attracting and retaining talent in Detroit in an effort to spur revitalization. Gough and Silverstein were chosen from hundreds of applicants to collaborate with individuals from all over the country and live, work, play, give, and lead in Detroit.

Challenge Detroit is a one-year fellowship program that provides the opportunity for tomorrow’s leaders to work at top regional companies, while spending one day a week collaborating with area nonprofits to address regional challenges and opportunities, including multi-modal transportation, homelessness, and community development.

During their year with Challenge Detroit, Annie will work with partnering host company Beaumont Health System, while Eric will work with partnering host General Motors.

Annie graduated from Grosse Pointe (Mich.) South High School and earned a B.A. degree in English at K. During her time at K, she also studied abroad at University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Kalamazoo College alumnus Eric Silverstein
Eric Silverstein ’14

“Growing up right next door to the city, I have always fostered a fondness for Detroit’s complex culture and history,” said Annie. “Now, I am eager to understand and identify with the city on a more intimate level by being fully immersed through living, working, playing and giving here.”

Eric is a Troy (Mich.) High School grad who earned a B.A. degree in psychology from K. He studied abroad at Universidad Antonio de Nebrija in Spain during his time at K.

“I have always welcomed adversity, so I guess you could say we have mutual interests,” said Eric.

During their year in Detroit, Annie and Eric will share their stories through regular blogging, video logging, and social media updates. For more information on Challenge Detroit and see videos with Annie and Eric talking about their upcoming experiences, visit www.challengedetroit.org/the-fellows.

 

A Stories Story

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Child's drawing for "Tacos for Dragons"“Tacos for Dragons” is just one of the many books featured in filmmaker Danny Kim’s new documentary “The Stories They Tell.”

The saga of the unlikely pairing of dragons and tacos is the labor of two seemingly unlikely co-authors, one a Kalamazoo College student and the other a third grader at Woodward Elementary in Kalamazoo.

And yet such collaborations are unlikely no more, thanks to the Co-authorship Project, the subject of Kim’s 80-minute film and the heart of Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan’s developmental psychology class for the last 15 years. The Co-authorship Project gives K students the opportunity to create an original storybook with an elementary student in order to gain a deeper insight into child development. Tan’s developmental psychology class is one of many academic service-learning courses that are designed in collaboration with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement.

The documentary showcases the project from beginning to end, starting with the picking of partners and culminating in the various unique completed works. The film spans almost a decade and a half of story making, to which Kim had unique access. He and Tan are husband and wife.

Teacher working with a young studentTrue to its etymology, animation infuses both the class and the film. “The co-authorship project has made the developmental psychology class come to life,” said Tan,” awakening ideas with real world experience. The collaborations give my students something more than what they could get in books alone.” Likewise, it is truly Kim’s animation of the creativity in each story that makes this film leap to life.

“The documentary is really about relationships, learning, connecting, and imagination,” said Tan.

All of these qualities get at the heart of what the co-authorship project is for both the K students and the children.

“Imagination and creativity is a core part of the project,” said Tan. “One skill that children naturally possess is imagination and creativity.”

Kim added that the contact with college students could help to inspire elementary school aged partners to pursue higher education.

The film highlights how much each interaction with a child can help augment what a college student knows about child development and affect a life path.

The life’s work of at least two of Tan’s former students offers proof. After viewing a sneak preview of the film on campus in April, both women confirmed that the project directly influenced their decisions to pursue education as a career.

Rachelle (Tomac) Busman ’05 is a school psychologist in the Byron Center (Michigan) School District and Sally (Warner) Read ’08 is the Head of the Kazoo School, an independent school in Kalamazoo.

“I remember everything about the little girl I worked with,” said Busman.

Kim’s film captures the value (and magic) of the project for both K students and Woodward students, as well as the idea’s birth and maturation in his wife’s developmental psychology class. Kim said he hopes the documentary inspires similar projects elsewhere.

“It would be wonderful if somebody saw it and said maybe we could start something like this,” said Kim.

Although the film is not yet released to the public, Kim does plan to have a formal showing once final edits have been made.

Text by Matt Munoz ’14; photo by Danny Kim; art by Pennilane Mara

Psych SIPs at MUPRC

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Five senior psychology majors with Proffessor Brittany Liu
Psychology majors who joined Professor Brittany Liu (far right) at this year’s MUPRC included (l-r)–Perri Nicholson, Jessica Varana, Elizabeth Hanley, Grace Barry, and Rachel LePage. Not pictured is Professor Robert Batsell.

Five senior psychology majors presented their Senior Individualized Projects at the 28th annual Michigan Undergraduate Psychology Research Conference [MUPRC] held on the campus of Albion College. Grace Barry presented the talk “The association of narrative structure and psychological well-being in emerging adulthood.” Elizabeth Hanley presented the talk “Reflexive attention to configural and local motion cues in a biological motion display.” Rachel LePage presented the poster “Variation in reward-sensitivity and negative affect in high-risk youth brain-reward function.” Perri Nicholson presented the talk “Saccharin consumption does not result in increased weight gain in rats.” Jessica Varana presented the talk “Moral decision making: Empathy as an indicator for utilitarian or deontological moral judgments.” The students were accompanied by Kalamazoo College psychology faculty members Brittany Liu and Robert Batsell.

Psychology Class Shapes Pro Voice Event

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Advertisement for Pro Voice eventThe winter term (2015) “Feminist Psychology of Women” class will present an event called “Pro Voice: Stories of Reproductive Justice” on Thursday, March 5, at 7 p.m. in Dewing Hall Room 103. The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited so tickets must be reserved in advance (contact Brenda Westra at 337.7331). Event co-sponsors include Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Michigan, Kalamazoo College’s Office of Student Involvement, and the Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement. Through theatrical performance students will give voice to stories of reproductive justice and challenges to that justice in the Southwest Michigan community. “Through interviews with community members we explored the meaning of reproductive justice,” said Allison Bloomfield, a junior biology major who is taking the feminist psychology class this term. “The experiences that were shared in the interviews will be dramatized by student actors in monologues about abortion, and these will be followed by a talk-back panel discussion.” Reproductive Justice is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights.

First Language: Music!

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Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan TanOur first “language” is music, according to the latest Psychology Today blog post of Kalamazoo College Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan. Or, more accurately, our first language is the interaction of our bodies with music, which begins as young as 10 months old! We may not synchronize our movements with the sound until the age of four (or thereabouts), but as infants we sure love to enlist our new skills in movement to explore sounds. In fact, this is how we build our knowledge about the physical properties of objects. And young as they may be, infants engage in that exploration very systematically. Finally, infants express their musical sensitivity in the way they listen to music. Siu-Lan provides video examples of the many nuances she discusses in this, her most recent blog post, and the infants she enlists to underscore her points are unforgettable (some have been seen by more than 20 million viewers). Our music-body language may be our first, but it lasts. I was thinking about this idea (and Siu-Lan’s blog) just yesterday on my walk to the bus, reciting in my head two lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (nearly the last words the two lovers speak to each other when both are conscious). Juliet: “O, now begone! More light and light it grows.”/ Romeo: “More light and light, more dark and dark our woes.” Two lines of iambic pentameter that match the iambs of a human heart beat, or a walk to the bus stop. What’s interesting is whether the music of the lines (and heart’s systole and diastole) help the hearer more deeply understand the complex combination of sorrow and joy that Shakespeare explores in his play. If so (and this reader thinks it is), then our first language matters a great deal to a life deeply lived.

Mara Richman ’14: Have Research, Will Travel

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Senior psychology major Mara Richman in front of a projection screen
Mara Richman ’14 presenting her research in Rome

Mara Richman ’14 recently cut classes for an entire week. But the senior psychology major wasn’t goofing off. Rather, she attended the International Borderline Personality and Allied Disorders annual conference in Rome—at their invitation—to deliver her research paper “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in Major Depression and Borderline Personality Disorder: A Meta-Analysis”

She was the conference’s youngest oral presenter.

“There were researchers from all over the world on this topic and I presented before a huge audience,” said Mara.

“I have a passion for meta-analysis and this is one of several that I have done on my own. This one looked at differences in mental state decoding between borderline personality disorder and major depressed patients.”

The National Institute of Mental Health defines borderline personality disorder (BPD) as a serious mental illness marked by unstable moods, behavior, and relationships. Most people with BPD suffer from problems with regulating emotions and thoughts, impulsive and reckless behavior, and unstable relationships with other people.

Mara’s paper was based on independent research she conducted while on study abroad at Kalamazoo College’s Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science, under the mentorship of Zsolt Unoka, M.D., Ph.D. She visited with Dr. Unoka during the Rome conference.

One of her K professors, Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies Peter Erdi, Ph.D., helped her arrange the research project. Help with funding for her Rome trip came from K’s Office of the Provost, Department of Psychology, and Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership.

“The conference truly shaped me and it was great to network with people in the field to learn more about the BPD,” said Mara.

Mara completed her SIP this past summer at Harvard University where she moved forward her BPD research by studying identity disturbance. She currently has 12 peer-reviewed journal articles in review or awaiting publication. Previously, she received an award from the American Psychological Association for outstanding research.

“My K advisor, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Jennifer Perry, Ph.D., has been a huge help in guiding me and helping me make these decisions.”

Mara, who came to K from Tampa, Fla., completed all of her graduation requirements early and will leave campus at the end of this fall quarter. She hopes to land fulltime work in a clinical facility in order to gain more clinical experience before pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a focus on BPD.

Baby Tears and Dancing Twins

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Kalamazoo College Psychology Professor Siu-Lan TanPsychology Press has launched a new social media campaign called “Ask Dr. Tan.” And, yes, it’s “our” Dr. Tan–Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan. Psychology Press is one of her publishers. Their Twitter account has many followers (among the highest number of any academic press). To celebrate having surpassed 50,000 followers, Psychology Press asked Siu-Lan to do #ASKDRTAN.

They chose wisely. Even though Siu-Lan confessed (in a recent BeLight article) to being a neophyte in the world of social media, her blog about a baby moved to tears by her mother’s singing was an incredibly successful “must-read” on two popular blogs in 2013. Psychology Press has launched its Twitter campaign with videos of twin girls dancing to their father’s guitar at ages 1, 2, and 3. The videos had gone viral, and #ASKDRTAN invites denizens of the blogosphere and Twitterverse to ask Siu-Lan any questions that come to mind about the girls’ behavior and their early responses to music. Example: What do most infants respond to first in music: melody or rhythm?

Siu-Lan will receive all questions before October 29 via Psychology Press’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Submitters of questions deemed top picks get a prize (a free copy of her book, Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance). Top pick questions will be developed as part of an article that will appear on the Psychology Press website and on Siu-Lan’s Psychology Today blog, What Shapes Film?

Rolling Through…Time?

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Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan’s latest blogProfessor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan’s latest blog–“Rolling Through Time“–reunites her with former K student John Baxa in a conversation about an animated short feature John helped create. That short is titled “Ball” and is about time. Or is it memory (its power and limitations)? Or aging? Play or death?  All this in a three-minute animated short? Of course, suggests Siu-Lan and John. It’s a matter of layers (certainly a part of What Shapes Film) as well as all that a viewer brings to the experience (the story is in the eye of the beholder). Enjoy your own encounter, to which you bring…what?

Three or four viewings evoked for me two poems, one by Wislawa Szymborska and the other by K’s own Con Hilberry. The poems are related to each other and to the animated short, though the three differ, especially in the feeling of their endings. The poems are shared below.

John graduated from K in 2009. He majored in psychology and earned a concentration in media studies. He recently completed a Master’s degree in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon. His short has no speech or text. Layers of image and music are everything. The music, somewhat ironically, is titled “Words.”

Still Life With a Balloon
(by Wislawa Szymborska, from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, Harcourt, Inc., 1998)

Returning memories?
No, at the time of death
I’d like to see lost objects
return instead.

Avalanches of gloves,
coats, suitcases, umbrellas—
come, and I’ll say at last:
What good’s all this?

Safety pins, two odd combs,
a paper rose, a knife,
some string—come, and I’ll say
at last: I haven’t missed you.

Please turn up, key, come out,
wherever you’ve been hiding,
in time for me to say:
You’ve gotten rusty friend!

Downpours of affidavits,
permits and questionnaires,
rain down and I will say:
I see the sun behind you.

My watch, dropped in a river,
bob up and let me seize you—
then, face to face, I’ll say:
Your so-called time is up.

And lastly, toy balloon
once kidnapped by the wind—
come home, and I will say:
There are no children here.

Fly out the open window
and into the wide world;
let someone else should “Look!”
and I will cry.

Memory
(by Conrad Hilberry, from Until the Full Moon Has Its Say, Wayne State University Press, 2014)

Everything that was—touch
football in the street, Peggy

McKay in the hay wagon,
Miss LaBatt’s geometry, the second

floor in Madison, where
one daughter slept in a closet.

Is any of this true? Nightgowns,
glances, griefs existing nowhere

but in this sieve of memory.
Newspaper files, bank accounts,

court records—nothing there.
It’s gone, except for these scratchy

words—blackbird on a branch,
long story caught in his throat.

My Cheated Eyes

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Kalamazoo College Psychology Professor Siu-Lan Tan in her officeBelieving is not seeing–especially at the movies. Siu-Lan Tan, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Kalamazoo College and a very popular blogger for Psychology Today and Oxford University Press (What Shapes Film: Elements of the Cinematic Experience and More), recently wrote two interesting pieces on perception … or rather, perhaps, misperception. The most fundamental illusion of the movies is obvious (except this reader never realized it until he read Siu-Lan’s blog), and that is the illusion of motion. Pictures don’t move even though things seem to move in the movies that I watch. From that revelation the blog moves (no pun intended) to differences in perception among different animals (an outcome of natural selection driven by survival). Take birds. Their perception has evolved to be much more sensitive to moving stimuli (compared to humans). Good for snatching prey, good for avoiding becoming prey, and good for safe high-speed landings into small nests. Not so good for a summer flick date night. That explains why Siu-Lan titled that blog: Why You Can’t Take a Pigeon to the Movies: A bird’s eye view of film. Not long after she wrote that mind-bending delight, Siu-Lan posted a second blog on the subject of perception–this one focused on a viral music video by the band OK Go. The title of that piece: Is the Writing on the Wall? A musical tribute to Gestalt psychologists. Turns out the writing was NOT on the wall (though you could have–and did–fool me). Siu-Lan skillfully connects the video’s visuals with the song’s words (I needed someone to do that because I was too busy following the moving–but, remember not really moving–pictures to even register the lyrics. Siu-Lan writes: “The music is not just an accompaniment to the collage of optical illusions and paradoxes, but an integral part of the work. The song is about miscommunication that can go on in a relationship. (Or is the idea of two people really ‘getting each other’ merely an illusion?)” Hmmmm. Anyway, check out both posts. You gotta see the OK Go video. Of course, you won’t be seeing what you’re seeing.