The Case for Musical Emotions

For many people, listening to music is a deeply emotional experience, but does that tap into universal emotions? In a 2016 study, psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures. This built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and…

Read More

What Makes a Good People Reader?

Humintell is here to train you as a people reader, but is there anything that could make you naturally good at this skill? It was this question which a team of researchers, including Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto, sought to answer in a 2014 study. This undertaking consisted of two experiments, one on college students with…

Read More

Understanding through Gesture

Language has a huge influence in determining how we interact with the world, but what about nonverbal behavior? When we speak and conceptualize the world in certain ways, we also structure our experience in order to make sense of and interact with it. In a novel 2017 study, Dr. Elizabeth Kirk and Dr. Carine Lewis…

Read More

Searching for Universal Gestures

If there are universal emotions and expressions, does that mean there are universal gestures? This is exactly what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyisung C. Hwang sought to answer in a 2012 study which sought to conduct a groundbreaking and comprehensive analysis on international differences in gestures. In order to answer this, they compiled…

Read More