Annoying

participants had heard recorded music before, let alone Western music, let alone a piano. Headphones were alien. “Of course, the listeners were surprised to hear Mafa out of the headphones,” Fritz says. “Often, they would turn around and look behind them. Later, they laughed about it and said that at first, they were a little bit scared.”

Fritz needed a way to ask his listeners to match a song with a feeling: to do this, he presented the listeners with three photos of a woman. She is smiling in one. She looks sad in another and scared in the third photo. The idea was to have the listeners point out the sad face for sad tunes, the happy face for happy tunes, and so on. “It was the first time, at least for some of them, to see printed-out versions of faces,” Fritz says. “Some people were very surprised to see a flat face like that.” In fact, Fritz had to exclude several participants because they didn’t recognize the printed faces as having any emotional symbolism. A frown didn’t symbolize a sad person to some of the Mafa.

Fritz concluded in a paper published in Current Biology that for the Mafa, traditional flute music doesn’t evoke a range of emotions at all.^{32} “For them,” Fritz says, “all of their music is somehow happy because all of the music is associated with certain rituals. And even if you have to bury someone, it’s still happy music because the music is there so people forget their grief for a while. Their music can do without emotional expressions.”

Yet—and this is really intriguing—most Mafa whom Fritz tested heard different emotional content in the Western piano melodies that he played for them. Compared to the Germans whom Fritz studied, Mafa listeners varied more widely in matching emotions with the tunes—but overall, both the German and the Mafa groups performed above chance level. Pieces in a major key were rated as happy; upbeat tempos were also more likely to be associated with the smiling face. Indefinite-mode and low-tempo pieces were more likely to be rated as sad and minor keys as scary. “One thing that I really want to know is how the Mafa can do it,” Fritz wonders. “How can they decode those emotional expressions in the music they have never before listened to? What is it that they understand in this? Is it something that goes deeper—something that maybe relates to more abstract patterns of emotional expression that occur in different art forms, maybe even in visual art?” It’s an interesting question.

The German group and the Mafa group both preferred consonant pieces to manipulated dissonant versions— these were consonant pieces that had been changed so that their frequencies were out of sync, as in McDermott’s study. Fritz and his colleagues wrote that typical Mafa comments were: “You shouldn’t let children play the flutes,” or “I know this, this is from the people of the Gouzda village. I really don’t like how they play the flutes.”

Fritz’s studies suggest that the preference for consonance (or an aversion to dissonance)—at least, in terms of harmonic order—isn’t only a Western thing. Fritz may have an explanation: “I’m quite positive that this relates to the organization of our auditory pathway.” He’s now looking at how brains process these consonant and dissonant pieces of music. “I find very interesting effects in the auditory pathway,” says Fritz. “The consonance seems to be processed more readily than the dissonance.”

The suggestion that humans prefer ordered sounds bears on the question of why we dislike other sounds. Take fingernails on a chalkboard, for example. In that screech, the frequencies are random; there is no order.

9. Breaking the Rules

Just finding the Language Research Center (LRC) at Georgia State University can be annoying. It’s off a two- lane road in a somewhat undeveloped suburb of Atlanta. There’s no sign out front, just an ordinary black mailbox with white letters on the side indicating the address.

Turning into the driveway, you are welcomed by a barbed wire–topped fence with a gate. Again, no sign, only a call box mounted to the left of the gate. If you’re expected, the person who answers the call box will open the gate. From there, you proceed along a driveway that runs through a copse of trees. After a quarter mile or so, you arrive at a second barbed wire–topped fence with another call box. Once again, if you are expected, someone inside uses a remote control to open the second gate. Now it’s a short drive to a low-slung building with a small parking lot off to the side. The front door of the building is locked, but Sarah Brosnan has the key.

Brosnan is in the psychology department at Georgia State, and she does some of her experimental work at the LRC. The high security is necessary because of threats from animal rights extremists who think that any research with animals is unacceptable, even the benign sort of behavioral research that Brosnan conducts. Some of the more radical animal rights groups have seen fit to firebomb the houses of researchers who use animals in their experiments—thus the locked doors.

Brosnan is interested in social learning in nonhuman primates. In 2003, she published a paper in Nature suggesting that capuchin monkeys possessed a notion of fairness, a social concept usually associated exclusively with humans.^{33} Her experiments on fairness work like this. Two capuchins will sit in cages next to each other. Their names are Liam and Logan. Liam can see what Logan is up to, and vice versa. Brosnan has taught the monkeys to play a kind of game. She hands them a granite token, and they have to hand it back to her to get a food reward. It’s a pretty simple game.

Here’s where it gets tricky. There are two food rewards: one is a highly desirable grape, and the other is a considerably less desirable piece of cucumber. In one condition of the experiment, Brosnan hands Liam a token, she holds up a grape, and he hands the token back and gets the grape. Then she hands Logan the token, but instead of the grape, she holds up the piece of cucumber. More often than not, Logan won’t hand back the token if he knows his partner got the better reward. Brosnan says that when Logan and his fellow capuchins find themselves in this position of being treated unfairly, their body language lets you know they find this unpleasant. “They tend to turn away—literally turning their backs on you—and move away if they can,” says Brosnan.

Since her initial publication in 2003, Brosnan has retreated somewhat from calling the behavior she sees in her capuchins “fairness.” Still, she considers the situation analogous to the feeling that humans get when they see someone else getting more pay for doing the same job.

“What we’re really testing is how do you respond when you’re the one who gets the lower salary,” she says, “not how do you respond when you hear there’s a discrepancy between salaries in the environment. So the monkeys don’t necessarily have to have an ideal of fairness or an idea of the way the world should work. All they have to care about is that they got less than someone else.”

Even that interpretation of the result goes too far down the path of anthropomorphizing for some animal behaviorists. Clive Wynne is a psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He says there’s another explanation for what Brosnan is seeing. “There’s an older concept, a more basic concept of frustration that humans share with many other species,” says Wynne. “It’s the tendency to act up if something they were expecting to receive is not given to them.” Just as Lucy Fitz Gibbon expects an A to sound like 440 Hz or a conservative listener expects music to sound a certain way, if the monkey expects a better reward and doesn’t get it, he’s frustrated. “That kind of frustrative behavior is seen in any number of different species,” says Wynne. “It was shown back in the 1920s in monkeys.”

That work was done by a psychologist at Yale University who had the delicious name of Otto Leif Tinklepaugh. He worked with a species of monkey known as cynomologous and with a particular cynomologous monkey named Psyche. Tinklepaugh’s experiment went like this. Psyche would sit in a chair with a board in front of her, preventing her from seeing two cups on a table across the room. When the board was lowered, Psyche could see what the experimenter (Tinklepaugh) was doing. This is how Tinklepaugh recorded the experiment in his notes:

The experimenter displays a piece of banana, lowers the board and places the banana under one of the cups. The board is then raised, and working behind it, with his hands hidden from the view of the monkey, the experimenter takes the banana out and deposits a piece of lettuce in its place. After the delay, the monkey is told to “come get the food.” She jumps down from the chair, rushes to the proper container and picks it up. She extends her hand to seize the food. But her hand drops to the floor without touching it. She looks at the lettuce, but (unless very hungry) does not touch it. She looks around the cup and behind the board. She stands up and looks under and around her. She picks the cup up and examines it thoroughly inside and out. She has on occasions turned toward observers present in the room and shrieked at them in apparent anger.^{34} [Emphasis in the original.]