Guido Orgs - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Guido Orgs

The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsi... more The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behavioural measure of direct verbal suggestibility that includes a correction for compliant responding (BSS-C), and psychometric measures of depersonalization-derealization (CDS), mindfulness (FFMQ), imagery vividness (VVIQ), and anxiety (GAD-7). Patients displayed nonsignificantly lower suggestibility than controls, (g = 0.26) but significantly lower mindfulness (g = 1.38), and imagery vividness (g = 0.63), and significantly greater anxiety (g = 1.39). Although suggestibility did not correlate with severity of depersonalization-derealization symptoms in controls, r=-.03 [95% CI: -.36, .30], there was a weak tendency for a positive association...

The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic re... more The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain mechanisms that mediate fluent apparent biological motion (ABM) perception from sequences of body postures. We presented body and nonbody stimuli varying in objective sequence duration and fluency of apparent movement. Three body postures were ordered to produce a fluent (ABC) or a nonfluent (ACB) apparent movement. This enabled us to identify brain areas involved in the perceptual reconstruction of body movement from identical lower-level static input. Participants judged the duration of a rectangle containing body/nonbody sequences, as an implicit measure of movement fluency. For body stimuli, fluent apparent motion sequences produced subjectively longer durations than nonfluent sequences of the same objective duration. This differencewas reduced for nonbody stimuli. This body-specific bias in duration perception was associated with increased bloo...

Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy

Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though pri... more Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though primarily used to target psychological and physical wellbeing in individuals with physical, medical, or neurological illnesses. To contribute to the relative lack of literature within the field of DMT for clinical mental health disorders, using a narrative synthesis, we review the scope of recent, controlled studies of DMT in samples with different psychiatric disorders including depression, schizophrenia, autism, and somatoform disorder. A systematic search of electronic databases (PubMed, Science Direct, World of Science, and Clinicaltrials.gov) was conducted to identify studies examining the effects of DMT in psychiatric populations. 15 studies were eligible for inclusion. After reviewing the principal results of the studies, we highlight strengths and weaknesses of this treatment approach and examine the potential efficacy of using bodily movements as a tool to reduce symptoms. We conclude by placing DMT within the context of contemporary cognitive neuroscience research, drawing out implications of such an orientation for future research, and discussing potential mechanisms by which DMT might reduce psychiatric symptoms. DMT has clear potential as a treatment for a range of conditions and symptoms and thus further research on its utility is warranted.

The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Aesthetics

Dance and music appear to belong together: Conventional definitions of dance often conceive it as... more Dance and music appear to belong together: Conventional definitions of dance often conceive it as a rhythmical activity in which a series of steps is performed to musical accompaniment. Indeed, dance and music share many similarities such as rhythm and may have co-evolved as a form of nonverbal communication between groups of people. Despite a rich history of composers and choreographers exploring the aesthetic relationship between dance and music, only a few scientific studies have systematically explored how the visual aesthetics of dance interact with the auditory aesthetics of sound and music. In this chapter we will focus on such interactions; we will explore the common evolutionary origins of dance and music and review existing research on how dance and music influence each other to produce an audio-visual aesthetics of sound and movement. The chapter will explore interactions in both directions: music influences dance perception by altering movement expressiveness, orienting ...

Our True Feelings is the third in the trilogy of Etudes in Tension and Crisis. How do we know how... more Our True Feelings is the third in the trilogy of Etudes in Tension and Crisis. How do we know how we really feel? how can we tell how other people are feeling? do we always tell the truth about how we feel? do we always want to know how others are feeling? We take a view of emotions as messy, intangible, dirty things responsible for both the embarrassments and horrors of human existence, as well as for its colour and gratification. Drawn from a collaboration with neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs, Our True Feelings presents findings from cognitive psychological research, examining how humans react, escape, confront, and are duped and seduced by our feelings. Intersecting and colliding with this are performance demonstrations of charged emotional states with images and sounds of travelling vapours. The result is a curious hybrid where performers that seem to be animating text gradually transform, sliding into their own compelling language and revealing an emotional physicality that raises...

The study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last d... more The study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last decade, bringing dance into the focus of the cognitive sciences. The Neurocognition of Dance brings together contributors from the worlds of psychology and dance, and discusses the relationship between dance and perception. Fully updated throughout, this edition introduces scientific perspectives on human movement, before dance professionals considering how their creative work relates to cognition and learning. Finally, researchers with personal links to the dance world demonstrate how neurocognitive methods are applied to studying different aspects related to dance.

Often music is used to emphasize particular dance gestures, or dance can be used to illustrate pa... more Often music is used to emphasize particular dance gestures, or dance can be used to illustrate particular passages of music. While each form relies on different sensory modalities, previous studies have demonstrated the ability to deduce the common structures between music and dance, even when each form is presented independently. However, from an aesthetic perspective, music and dance are not always used congruently, to emphasize or complement each other, but are sometimes used in competition, or conflict with each other to emphasize the narrative (Fogelsanger & Afanador, 2006). With this deliberate shift in congruency between stimuli, this begs the questions as to whether congruence between stimuli enhances aesthetic judgements for contemporary pieces, in line with the congruence association model. This study aims to empirically test the assertions that altering the congruency between a contemporary dance and soundtrack leads to a different aesthetic perception of the presentation...

Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei Experimente zur semantischen Verarbeitung von Umweltgerausche... more Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei Experimente zur semantischen Verarbeitung von Umweltgerauschen, untersucht im Paradigma der semantischen Bahnung. Neben Verhaltensmasen werden hierbei in ereigniskorrelierten Potentialen (EKPs) N400-Effekte betrachtet. Im ersten Experiment erzeugten Umweltgerausche im direkten Vergleich mit visuell dargebotenen Wortern Bahnung im Verhalten sowie ahnliche N400-Effekte. Das zweite Experiment untersuchte semantische Bahnung von Umweltgerauschen in zwei Aufgaben. Es wurden nur noch Wort-Gerauschpaare verwendet. In der ersten Aufgabe (wie Experiment 1) beurteilten die Teilnehmer, ob Wort und Gerausch eines Paares zusammen passten. In der zweiten (physikalischen) Aufgabe beurteilten die Teilnehmer die Prasentationsseite des Gerauschs. Ahnliche N400-Effekte fur Gerausche konnten in beiden Aufgaben beobachtet werden, allerdings wurden die Ergebnisse moglicherweise von Ubertragungseffekten durch vorherige explizite semantische Verarbeitung verzerrt. Das dr...

Dance has become an important for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, a... more Dance has become an important for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, and as an intervention for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite this growing scientific interest in dance, no standardised psychometric instrument exists to assess people’s dance experience. Here, we introduce the Goldsmiths Dance Sophistication Index (Gold-DSI), a 26-item questionnaire to measure individual differences in active and passive dance experience on a continuous scale. The Gold-DSI was developed in three stages. In the first stage, a set of 76 items was generated; a) by adapting questions from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Müllensiefen et al., 2014), and b) through a stakeholder workshop using a grounded theory approach. The second stage focused on item reduction. Using a large-scale online survey (N=424) , hierarchical factor analysis was used to fit a model comprising of one general and six secondary factors (28 items in total). In stage...

What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subje... more What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions, by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but not in movement trajectory. Dance-naïve participants rated the dance videos on speed, effort, reproducibility, and preference. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we show that faster movement sequences with varied velocity profiles are judged to be more effortful, less reproducible, and more aesthetically pleasing than slower sequences with uniform velocity profiles. Accordingly, dance aesthetics depend not only on which movement is being performed but on how movements are executed and linked. Accordingly, the aesthetics of movement timing may apply across culturally-specific dance styles and predict both preference for and perceived dif...

Empirical Studies of the Arts

How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how ... more How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing, and vocalizations but no music. Dance and sound were paired either as recorded or with the original soundtrack in reverse so that the performers’ sounds were no longer coupled to their movements. A third group watched the dance video in silence. Audiovisual incongruency was rated as more enjoyable than congruent or silent conditions. In line with mainstream conceptions of dance as movement-to-music, arbitrary relationships between sound and movement were preferred to causal relationships in which performers produce their own soundtrack. Performed synchrony Granger caused changes in electrodermal activity only in the incongruent condition consistent with “aesthetic captu...

PloS one, 2017

Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into ... more Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into the evolutionary origins of these cultural practices has focused on why humans perform rather than watch or listen to dance and music. In this study, we show that movement synchrony among a group of performers predicts the aesthetic appreciation of live dance performances. We developed a choreography that continuously manipulated group synchronization using a defined movement vocabulary based on arm swinging, walking and running. The choreography was performed live to four audiences, as we continuously tracked the performers' movements, and the spectators' affective responses. We computed dynamic synchrony among performers using cross recurrence analysis of data from wrist accelerometers, and implicit measures of arousal from spectators' heart rates. Additionally, a subset of spectators provided continuous ratings of enjoyment and perceived synchrony using tablet computers. G...

Psychological research, Jan 8, 2017

Highly demanding cognitive-motor tasks can be negatively influenced by the presence of auditory s... more Highly demanding cognitive-motor tasks can be negatively influenced by the presence of auditory stimuli. The human brain attempts to partially suppress the processing of potential distractors in order that motor tasks can be completed successfully. The present study sought to further understand the attentional neural systems that activate in response to potential distractors during the execution of movements. Nineteen participants (9 women and 10 men) were administered isometric ankle-dorsiflexion tasks for 10 s at a light intensity. Electroencephalography was used to assess the electrical activity in the brain, and a music excerpt was used to distract participants. Three conditions were administered: auditory distraction during the execution of movement (auditory distraction; AD), movement execution in the absence of auditory distraction (control; CO), and auditory distraction in the absence of movement (stimulus-only; SO). AD was compared with SO to identify the mechanisms underly...

Psychophysiology, Oct 27, 2016

The brain mechanisms by which music-related interventions ameliorate fatigue-related symptoms dur... more The brain mechanisms by which music-related interventions ameliorate fatigue-related symptoms during the execution of fatiguing motor tasks are hitherto under-researched. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of music on brain electrical activity and psychophysiological measures during the execution of an isometric fatiguing ankle-dorsiflexion task performed until the point of volitional exhaustion. Nineteen healthy participants performed two fatigue tests at 40% of maximal voluntary contraction while listening to music or in silence. Electrical activity in the brain was assessed by use of a 64-channel EEG. The results indicated that music downregulated theta waves in the frontal, central, and parietal regions of the brain during exercise. Music also induced a partial attentional switching from associative thoughts to task-unrelated factors (dissociative thoughts) during exercise, which led to improvements in task performance. Moreover, participants exper...

The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsi... more The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behavioural measure of direct verbal suggestibility that includes a correction for compliant responding (BSS-C), and psychometric measures of depersonalization-derealization (CDS), mindfulness (FFMQ), imagery vividness (VVIQ), and anxiety (GAD-7). Patients displayed nonsignificantly lower suggestibility than controls, (g = 0.26) but significantly lower mindfulness (g = 1.38), and imagery vividness (g = 0.63), and significantly greater anxiety (g = 1.39). Although suggestibility did not correlate with severity of depersonalization-derealization symptoms in controls, r=-.03 [95% CI: -.36, .30], there was a weak tendency for a positive association...

The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic re... more The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain mechanisms that mediate fluent apparent biological motion (ABM) perception from sequences of body postures. We presented body and nonbody stimuli varying in objective sequence duration and fluency of apparent movement. Three body postures were ordered to produce a fluent (ABC) or a nonfluent (ACB) apparent movement. This enabled us to identify brain areas involved in the perceptual reconstruction of body movement from identical lower-level static input. Participants judged the duration of a rectangle containing body/nonbody sequences, as an implicit measure of movement fluency. For body stimuli, fluent apparent motion sequences produced subjectively longer durations than nonfluent sequences of the same objective duration. This differencewas reduced for nonbody stimuli. This body-specific bias in duration perception was associated with increased bloo...

Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy

Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though pri... more Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though primarily used to target psychological and physical wellbeing in individuals with physical, medical, or neurological illnesses. To contribute to the relative lack of literature within the field of DMT for clinical mental health disorders, using a narrative synthesis, we review the scope of recent, controlled studies of DMT in samples with different psychiatric disorders including depression, schizophrenia, autism, and somatoform disorder. A systematic search of electronic databases (PubMed, Science Direct, World of Science, and Clinicaltrials.gov) was conducted to identify studies examining the effects of DMT in psychiatric populations. 15 studies were eligible for inclusion. After reviewing the principal results of the studies, we highlight strengths and weaknesses of this treatment approach and examine the potential efficacy of using bodily movements as a tool to reduce symptoms. We conclude by placing DMT within the context of contemporary cognitive neuroscience research, drawing out implications of such an orientation for future research, and discussing potential mechanisms by which DMT might reduce psychiatric symptoms. DMT has clear potential as a treatment for a range of conditions and symptoms and thus further research on its utility is warranted.

The Oxford Handbook of Empirical Aesthetics

Dance and music appear to belong together: Conventional definitions of dance often conceive it as... more Dance and music appear to belong together: Conventional definitions of dance often conceive it as a rhythmical activity in which a series of steps is performed to musical accompaniment. Indeed, dance and music share many similarities such as rhythm and may have co-evolved as a form of nonverbal communication between groups of people. Despite a rich history of composers and choreographers exploring the aesthetic relationship between dance and music, only a few scientific studies have systematically explored how the visual aesthetics of dance interact with the auditory aesthetics of sound and music. In this chapter we will focus on such interactions; we will explore the common evolutionary origins of dance and music and review existing research on how dance and music influence each other to produce an audio-visual aesthetics of sound and movement. The chapter will explore interactions in both directions: music influences dance perception by altering movement expressiveness, orienting ...

Our True Feelings is the third in the trilogy of Etudes in Tension and Crisis. How do we know how... more Our True Feelings is the third in the trilogy of Etudes in Tension and Crisis. How do we know how we really feel? how can we tell how other people are feeling? do we always tell the truth about how we feel? do we always want to know how others are feeling? We take a view of emotions as messy, intangible, dirty things responsible for both the embarrassments and horrors of human existence, as well as for its colour and gratification. Drawn from a collaboration with neuroscientist Dr Guido Orgs, Our True Feelings presents findings from cognitive psychological research, examining how humans react, escape, confront, and are duped and seduced by our feelings. Intersecting and colliding with this are performance demonstrations of charged emotional states with images and sounds of travelling vapours. The result is a curious hybrid where performers that seem to be animating text gradually transform, sliding into their own compelling language and revealing an emotional physicality that raises...

The study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last d... more The study of human movement and action has become a topic of increasing relevance over the last decade, bringing dance into the focus of the cognitive sciences. The Neurocognition of Dance brings together contributors from the worlds of psychology and dance, and discusses the relationship between dance and perception. Fully updated throughout, this edition introduces scientific perspectives on human movement, before dance professionals considering how their creative work relates to cognition and learning. Finally, researchers with personal links to the dance world demonstrate how neurocognitive methods are applied to studying different aspects related to dance.

Often music is used to emphasize particular dance gestures, or dance can be used to illustrate pa... more Often music is used to emphasize particular dance gestures, or dance can be used to illustrate particular passages of music. While each form relies on different sensory modalities, previous studies have demonstrated the ability to deduce the common structures between music and dance, even when each form is presented independently. However, from an aesthetic perspective, music and dance are not always used congruently, to emphasize or complement each other, but are sometimes used in competition, or conflict with each other to emphasize the narrative (Fogelsanger & Afanador, 2006). With this deliberate shift in congruency between stimuli, this begs the questions as to whether congruence between stimuli enhances aesthetic judgements for contemporary pieces, in line with the congruence association model. This study aims to empirically test the assertions that altering the congruency between a contemporary dance and soundtrack leads to a different aesthetic perception of the presentation...

Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei Experimente zur semantischen Verarbeitung von Umweltgerausche... more Die vorliegende Arbeit umfasst drei Experimente zur semantischen Verarbeitung von Umweltgerauschen, untersucht im Paradigma der semantischen Bahnung. Neben Verhaltensmasen werden hierbei in ereigniskorrelierten Potentialen (EKPs) N400-Effekte betrachtet. Im ersten Experiment erzeugten Umweltgerausche im direkten Vergleich mit visuell dargebotenen Wortern Bahnung im Verhalten sowie ahnliche N400-Effekte. Das zweite Experiment untersuchte semantische Bahnung von Umweltgerauschen in zwei Aufgaben. Es wurden nur noch Wort-Gerauschpaare verwendet. In der ersten Aufgabe (wie Experiment 1) beurteilten die Teilnehmer, ob Wort und Gerausch eines Paares zusammen passten. In der zweiten (physikalischen) Aufgabe beurteilten die Teilnehmer die Prasentationsseite des Gerauschs. Ahnliche N400-Effekte fur Gerausche konnten in beiden Aufgaben beobachtet werden, allerdings wurden die Ergebnisse moglicherweise von Ubertragungseffekten durch vorherige explizite semantische Verarbeitung verzerrt. Das dr...

Dance has become an important for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, a... more Dance has become an important for research in empirical aesthetics, social and motor cognition, and as an intervention for neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite this growing scientific interest in dance, no standardised psychometric instrument exists to assess people’s dance experience. Here, we introduce the Goldsmiths Dance Sophistication Index (Gold-DSI), a 26-item questionnaire to measure individual differences in active and passive dance experience on a continuous scale. The Gold-DSI was developed in three stages. In the first stage, a set of 76 items was generated; a) by adapting questions from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Müllensiefen et al., 2014), and b) through a stakeholder workshop using a grounded theory approach. The second stage focused on item reduction. Using a large-scale online survey (N=424) , hierarchical factor analysis was used to fit a model comprising of one general and six secondary factors (28 items in total). In stage...

What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subje... more What constitutes a beautiful action? Research into dance aesthetics has largely focussed on subjective features like familiarity with the observed movement but has rarely studied objective features like speed or acceleration. We manipulated the kinematic complexity of observed actions, by creating dance sequences that varied in movement timing, but not in movement trajectory. Dance-naïve participants rated the dance videos on speed, effort, reproducibility, and preference. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we show that faster movement sequences with varied velocity profiles are judged to be more effortful, less reproducible, and more aesthetically pleasing than slower sequences with uniform velocity profiles. Accordingly, dance aesthetics depend not only on which movement is being performed but on how movements are executed and linked. Accordingly, the aesthetics of movement timing may apply across culturally-specific dance styles and predict both preference for and perceived dif...

Empirical Studies of the Arts

How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how ... more How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing, and vocalizations but no music. Dance and sound were paired either as recorded or with the original soundtrack in reverse so that the performers’ sounds were no longer coupled to their movements. A third group watched the dance video in silence. Audiovisual incongruency was rated as more enjoyable than congruent or silent conditions. In line with mainstream conceptions of dance as movement-to-music, arbitrary relationships between sound and movement were preferred to causal relationships in which performers produce their own soundtrack. Performed synchrony Granger caused changes in electrodermal activity only in the incongruent condition consistent with “aesthetic captu...

PloS one, 2017

Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into ... more Synchronized movement is a ubiquitous feature of dance and music performance. Much research into the evolutionary origins of these cultural practices has focused on why humans perform rather than watch or listen to dance and music. In this study, we show that movement synchrony among a group of performers predicts the aesthetic appreciation of live dance performances. We developed a choreography that continuously manipulated group synchronization using a defined movement vocabulary based on arm swinging, walking and running. The choreography was performed live to four audiences, as we continuously tracked the performers' movements, and the spectators' affective responses. We computed dynamic synchrony among performers using cross recurrence analysis of data from wrist accelerometers, and implicit measures of arousal from spectators' heart rates. Additionally, a subset of spectators provided continuous ratings of enjoyment and perceived synchrony using tablet computers. G...

Psychological research, Jan 8, 2017

Highly demanding cognitive-motor tasks can be negatively influenced by the presence of auditory s... more Highly demanding cognitive-motor tasks can be negatively influenced by the presence of auditory stimuli. The human brain attempts to partially suppress the processing of potential distractors in order that motor tasks can be completed successfully. The present study sought to further understand the attentional neural systems that activate in response to potential distractors during the execution of movements. Nineteen participants (9 women and 10 men) were administered isometric ankle-dorsiflexion tasks for 10 s at a light intensity. Electroencephalography was used to assess the electrical activity in the brain, and a music excerpt was used to distract participants. Three conditions were administered: auditory distraction during the execution of movement (auditory distraction; AD), movement execution in the absence of auditory distraction (control; CO), and auditory distraction in the absence of movement (stimulus-only; SO). AD was compared with SO to identify the mechanisms underly...

Psychophysiology, Oct 27, 2016

The brain mechanisms by which music-related interventions ameliorate fatigue-related symptoms dur... more The brain mechanisms by which music-related interventions ameliorate fatigue-related symptoms during the execution of fatiguing motor tasks are hitherto under-researched. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of music on brain electrical activity and psychophysiological measures during the execution of an isometric fatiguing ankle-dorsiflexion task performed until the point of volitional exhaustion. Nineteen healthy participants performed two fatigue tests at 40% of maximal voluntary contraction while listening to music or in silence. Electrical activity in the brain was assessed by use of a 64-channel EEG. The results indicated that music downregulated theta waves in the frontal, central, and parietal regions of the brain during exercise. Music also induced a partial attentional switching from associative thoughts to task-unrelated factors (dissociative thoughts) during exercise, which led to improvements in task performance. Moreover, participants exper...