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Research interests

Area of specialization: Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Sciences. Main focus: cognition, emotion, music and speech perception.

My current research interests focus mainly on the topic of emotion, music and speech and their cognitive ramifications, including links between music and emotion, music and speech, and the effects of music and speech on non-musical, non-linguistic abilities. My research has dealt primarily with the role of acoustic properties shared by music and speech (e.g. rate, pitch height, intensity) on affect (valence, energy and tension arousal) and its subsequent effect on non-musical tasks (e.g. spatial tasks, reaction time, creativity tasks) as well as the effects of musical training on perceived prosody in speech.

Over the past several decades there has been considerable interest in the perception of emotional meaning conveyed through music and speech prosody but also the experiential effects induced by these two modes of communication (as reviewed in my articles: Ilie & Thompson, 2006; Ilie (Husain), Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Ilie (Husain), 2001; 2003, 2004). Research on the communication of emotion in the auditory domain has included many studies of music and speech, but rarely have these domains been compared. My dissertation research involved a direct comparison of the affective consequences of manipulating acoustic features in music and speech. Dependent measures assessed both perceptual effects (affect ratings following brief exposure to music or speech) and experiential effects (assessed by the Profile of Mood States followed more prolonged exposure to music or speech). In perceptual tests (Ilie & Thompson, 2006), I examined three dimensions of affect: valence, energetic-arousal, and tense-arousal. Across conditions, music stimuli were assigned higher ratings of valence and energetic arousal than speech stimuli, suggesting broad differences in the affective consequences of listening to these two types of stimuli. The finding is consistent with reports that people often listen to music for pleasure and to modify energetic states, whereas people rarely listen to speech for this purpose. More importantly, however, manipulations of acoustic attributes influenced affective appraisals of both music and speech in similar ways, with all three dimensions of affect being influenced by at least one acoustic attribute. The finding suggests that intensity, pace, and pitch height provide listeners with valuable perceptual information that allows them to decode emotional meaning in either music or speech prosody. These results support the view that the capacity to process certain features of speech may also subserve the perception of music. Strikingly, I observed comparable results when I evaluated the experiential effects of more prolonged exposure to acoustic attributes in music and speech, although in this case acoustic attributes were associated with a narrower range of affective consequences (Ilie & Thompson, in progress). The latter findings suggest that perceptual and experiential consequences of exposure to music and speech are homologous, but that prolonged exposure to music or speech results in more focused affective consequences.

At present, I continue to examine whether certain acoustic events have affective meaning that is appraised by circuitry that does not differentiate between the types of stimuli being processed. I am also in the process of extending my examination of acoustic properties to examination of affective communication in other modalities (e.g. facial expression, gesture, and movement).

My research goals include, but are not limited to, an examination of: (1) cross-modal auditory, visual, and motor properties that are important in conveying emotional meaning in infants and adults; (2) how exposure to such properties can influence a listener’s perception and experience of valence, energy, and tension; (3) whether such changes in valence, energy and tension mediate subsequent performance on affective and non-affective cognitive tasks.

To inquire about research opportunities in my lab please email me at gilie@psych.utoronto.ca.