• You are what you read, study suggests

    Lionsgate

    By Linda Carroll

    Novels may have a lot more power than we think.

    When you identify with a literary character, like Katniss Everdeen of the "Hunger Games" books, there’s a good chance you’ll become more like her, new study shows.

    Researchers have found that when you lose yourself in a work of fiction, your behavior and thoughts can metamorphose to match those of your favorite character, according to the study published early online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

    The researchers believe that fictional characters can change us for the good.

    So, if you bonded with Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” you might become more focused on ethical behavior, says the study’s lead author, Geoff Kaufman, a post-doctoral researcher at Tiltfactor Laboratories at Dartmouth College.

    But the fiction-effect can have a dark side. “Think of 'American Psycho,'” Kaufman says. “The character is very likable and charismatic. But he’s a serial killer. To the extent that you connect with him, you may try to understand or justify the actions he’s committing.”

    Kaufman and his co-author Lisa Libby of Ohio State University suspected that when people read a fictional story they vicariously experience their favorite character’s emotions, thoughts and beliefs in a process that’s been dubbed “experience-taking.”

    Kaufman and Libby found that experience-taking can lead to real changes in the lives of readers. What the researchers can’t say yet is whether those changes are brief or long-lasting.

    Kaufman suspects novels can sometimes be life-changing. “If you’ve got a deep connection with the characters, it can have a lasting impact,” he says. “It can inspire you to re-read something. And then the impact can be strengthened over time.”

    The researchers ran several experiments to look at how we react to fiction. In one, they found that people who strongly identified with a fictional character who overcame many obstacles in order to vote were significantly more likely to vote in a real election days later than volunteers who read a different story.  

    In another experiment, the researchers compared two groups of volunteers who read different versions of a story in which the protagonist was gay. In one version, readers didn’t learn till the end that the character was gay. In the other, they learned that detail right at the beginning.

    Study volunteers who learned about the sexual orientation of the hero at the end of the story expressed more positive feelings towards gay people when they were questioned later on.

    That’s because they got to know the character and connect with him before they had a chance to cloud their impression with gay stereotypes, Kaufman explains. Those who learned about the character’s sexual orientation early on didn’t relate to him as much because their stereotypes put distance between them and the character.

    Kaufman believes that the fiction-effect only comes with written works. “When we watch a movie, by the very essence of it, we’re positioned as spectators,” he explains. “So it’s hard to imagine yourself as the character. I suspect that if you read the screenplay it would be more powerful as far as experience-taking goes.”

    So, who is Kaufman’s favorite fictional personality? Anna Karenina, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy’s novel of the same name.

    “My identification with her might have inspired my research,” Kaufman muses. “It’s the connection with a female character and understanding her struggles and difficulty in adapting to life and society. Looking back, I think a lot of my favorites are strong, complex female characters struggling in society.”

    What literary character do you most identify with, and why? Let us know in the comments here, or over on our Facebook page -- we may use you in an upcoming msnbc.com post! 

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  • What's the lifespan of a singer's voice?

    Redferns via Getty Images

    Whitney Houston was known as "The Voice" at the peak of her career, but her vocal range had deteriorated over the years.

    By Sheila Eldred
    Discovery Channel
    Before Whitney Houston died last week, there was talk of the 48-year-old legendary vocalist staging a comeback.

    It wouldn't have been easy: Somewhere between the years of Houston mesmerizing fans with the resonating "you" in "I Will Always Love You" and the demise of the reality TV show "Being Bobby Brown," Houston's voice had deteriorated.

    What is the normal life span of a voice? Can training or techniques prevent aging of the vocal cords, and can surgery -- or a special gel -- correct it?

    NEWS: How Xanax, Alcohol May Have Killed Whitney Houston

    Think of a singer as an athlete, experts suggest.

    "Just like any other muscle, it's a physical thing," said Andrea Leap, a professional singer and voice instructor at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis. "It depends on the use. If you stopped walking up the stairs every day, it would get harder. It's exactly the same thing for the voice. Muscles do lose strength and agility as they age, so more effort is required in continuing that."

    Opera star Placido Domingo is still belting out arias at age 71, because he's in terrific shape vocally, Leap said.

    "The voice is not a finite thing; it's not something you use up," Leap said. "When you're singing, you're training your voice at a more intense level than talking. It's like going to the gym and lifting weights as opposed to putting groceries away."

    VIDEO: Have you ever wondered why some people can sing and others can't?

    In fact, overexertion is such an issue that the opera singers' union maintains strict rules about the frequency an opera singer can perform.

    Preserving their general health, getting good rest and hydration, also helps keeps singers' voices in shape. Houston's overall health was clearly poor.

    "If you're a smoker, it's going to be harder; if you're drinking every night, it's going to be harder," Leap said.

    "Anything that you put into your body is going to go right past your vocal cords. I know some people who won't drink soda for that reason. I'm sure with Whitney Houston the larger issue was her overall health. That voice was an unbelievable instrument; it was going to take a lot to really undo it."

    BLOG: How Can I Sing Better?

    Even with good health habits, however, vocal cords stiffen with age.

    "As the vocal membranes are used more,they become fibrous and stiff with a diminished amplitude of vibration," said Dr. Steven Zeitels, Professor of Laryngeal Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

    "Consequently you have to use more air pressure from the lungs to drive the vocal cords into vibration. This occurs from decades of voice use so that the vocal cords become worn out as an individual ages."

    Many singers develop growths or nodules on their vocal cords that can bleed and eventually scar. Scarring makes the voice hoarse.

    Advances in technology have made surgeries to remove those growths much more common.

    Zeitels estimates he's performed about 75,000 voice operations, 500-700 of those on singers -- including Adele, The Who's lead singer Roger Daltrey, and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. Most of the singers he has performed on have been opera singers, because of the substantial demands on their voice.

    "You can't do marathons to train for marathons," Zeitels said. "There is a simple amount of mileage that vocal tissues can handle."

    Zeitels has been developing a special gel that he hopes will allow singers to restore and preserve their voices.

    When Zeitels explained the idea of the biogel to Julie Andrews during dinner one night, he mentioned that one of his reservations was that he didn't know how long it would work.

    "Well, for people like me, even if it would last for a while we could utilize that and get things done," he remembers Andrews saying. "So, we came to think that the way to go at it was not to go for a home run, the perfect fix, but to get it to first base."

    Now, he says the gel is ready for human trial.

    "The holy grail is to inject a biogel into the vocal cord and restore it. So from a performing perspective, these folks who so-called can't sing anymore are totally fit to sing. Julie Andrews could sing beautifully tomorrow if she had the biogel. It's not that she's too old to sing."

    Both Andrews, who went to Zeitels after losing pliability in her vocal cords due to a poor surgery, and Tyler encouraged Zeitels and MIT scientist Bob Langer to go forward with the biogel project, even contributing money to the development.

    "It's not some magic potion," Zeitels said. "We're just making the vocal cords pure."

    The gel is currently in a primitive form, but Zeitels is confident it will work in humans; trials will tell the degree to which the current form will work. 

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  • Why books and movies are better the second time

    By Natalie Wolchover
    Life's Little Mysteries 

    New research reveals why people like to reread books, re-watch movies and generally repeat the same experiences over and over again. It’s not addictive or ritualistic behavior, but rather a conscious effort to probe deeper layers of significance in the revisited material, while also reflecting on one's own growth through the lens of the familiar book, movie or place.

    Cristel Russell, a consumer behavior researcher at American University, and her colleagues interviewed 23 people to identify the underlying reasons for what they call "re-consumption." As detailed in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, the researchers found that re-consumption is not merely a nostalgic attempt to retrieve the past, but rather an active search for new meaning, and one that has great emotional value.

    "Because re-experiencing offers a way to look at oneself through the same lens but with different eyes, it offers many therapeutic benefits," Russell wrote in an email. "So long as one is actively conscious of the re-experience (and it's not a passive, uncontrollable addiction), it can offer many self-reflexive opportunities."

    For example, one study participant was a church minister who regularly rereads the Bible. He said he sometimes interprets familiar passages differently and therefore has to amend the views he might have expressed publicly. "He saw this as a sign of growth," Russell told Life’s Little Mysteries.

    The authors said their finding confirmed an assertion of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who in 1953 argued that repetition enables one to achieve an understanding of one’s personal past. More importantly, re-consuming causes the contrasts between our past and present selves to become manifest. We recall how we interpreted words or footage in the past, and reflect on the differences with our current interpretation. [6 Fun Ways to Sharpen Your Memory]

    Re-consumption also can be deeply therapeutic. "Psychotherapists view the repetition of an experience as useful to purge that experience of its emotional excesses, a psychoanalytical concept called abreaction," the study authors explain. "The re-experience allows one to become conscious of repressed or suppressed traumatic events. It has led the way to abreaction therapy, where patients are helped to re-enact the experience in a controlled environment  – for instance, to resolve post–traumatic stress disorder, characterized by the persistent re-experience of a traumatic event."

    For example, a study participant named Lynette read a book, "The Bridges of Madison County," for abreaction. She explained that there are "just times when I’m feeling a bit low for some reason; I need to read that book, have a real good cry, and get it all out of my system  –  and, I don’t know, it just does it for me."

    In short, the researchers explained, the book allows her to purge an excess of sadness.

    Russell said the new findings have profound implications for marketing. "Marketers are always trying to keep experiences fresh and new. We show that even old experiences can be perceived as offering new perspectives," she wrote. "Also, many industries are in the business of re-launching, or creating new versions of this or that (movies made from stories in a book, re-releases of old classics, etc.), so we show them the ways in which consumers may respond to these re-experiences."

    The study has psychological implications, too, she said. Instead of feeling awkward or unusual about rereading the same books, re-watching films or revisiting the same places, the study shows that in fact re-consuming is therapeutic and should be encouraged. "In the age of progress and always pushing newness and differences, it seems that we forget that it's okay to redo."

    What movie could you watch over and over -- or what book have you reread countless times? Join the discussion on Facebook. 

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  • More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars

    NBC's chief medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman reports on a new trend called "vocal fry," a speech pattern of low, rough sounds that's popular with pop stars and entertainers

    Rca / RCA

    Pop stars like Ke$ha use vocal fry to drop their voices down into lower notes. Researchers say the croaky sounds are becoming more prevalent in college-aged women's speech.

    By Melissa Dahl, NBC News

    The influence of pop singers like Britney Spears and Ke$ha may actually be changing the way some young women speak, suggests a (small) new study.

    The report, recently published online in the Journal of Voice, examines the prevalence of a speech pattern called "vocal fry," the creaky, rough, guttural sound that pop singers sometimes use to slip into lower notes. Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, one of the study authors (along with Lesley Wolk and Dianne Slavin) and a speech scientist at Long Island University, describes the sound like "rattled, popping air." 

    Can you hear in your head the way Spears croaks the line "Oh baby, baby" in "Baby One More Time"? (If not, watch the video here.) The first two seconds of the Ke$ha hit "Blah Blah Blah" is another good example. And as our pals over at Maddow Blog point out, you can hear vocal fry in practically every word out of Kim Kardashian's mouth. Listen to an example from the study provided by Abdelli-Beruh here:

    Listen to an audio file with a "vocal fry" - a guttural use of one's voice - occurring at the end of a sentence.

    Vocal fry has historically been considered a speech disorder, the study authors note, often seen in patients with vocal cord damage. Specifically, the speech habit can cause contact granulomas, benign but painful lesions on the vocal cords.

    But this study suggests the quirk is becoming normalized. Researchers from Long Island University recorded speech from 34 college-aged women, and found that more than two-thirds of them used the croaky "vocal fry" sounds, usually dipping into the low, creaky register at the end of a sentence.

    "My colleagues and I have noticed this speech pattern in our young female college students," says Abdelli-Beruh, adding that about 99 percent of their students are female. After publishing the data on vocal fry in college women, she and her team did a similar study on college men, and found that the guys are much less likely to speak in croaks. "Interestingly, some research indicates that in some dialects of British English, male speakers use fry more often than female. So maybe it is also a gender marker," Abdelli-Beruh says.

    It's likely also a generational marker. "(A)necdotally, vocal fry is judged to be annoying by those who are not as young as the college students we tested," she says. "My son, who is a teenager, listens to 92.3 NOW in NYC. I noticed the way the voice said 'NOW' on the radio (is) clearly glottal fry."

    The volunteer speakers didn't use vocal fry when speaking vowel sounds, suggesting the trend is more habitual or social than anything else. "It is possible that these college students have either practiced or observed this vocal register and modeled it to match popular figures," the authors write, noting that future research will explore the social nature of vocal fry. But the continuous use of the guttural speech could put these young women at risk for vocal cord damage. (It's tough to produce the sound loudly, so the croak may cause increased vocal cord tension and fatigue.) 

    Have you noticed croaky, throaty sounds in young women's speech? Share your favorite example in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

    UPDATE: Best comment so far, from Facebook fan Amelia Price: "These girls sound like a bunch of neurotic dolphins who do not make sense." Brilliant. Can you top that?

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  • You can't help loving (or hating) 'Twilight,' study suggests

    Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

    The thought of a new "Twilight" movie does this to some people. Others -- not so much.

    By Linda Carroll

    When the new "Twilight" film opens, fans will be lining up hours before to make sure they get in. Others will be steering clear.

    And that won’t have anything to do with movie reviews or the comments of friends. Some folks just aren’t wired to enjoy flights of fantasy, a new study suggests.

    It’s all got to do with how we experience fantasy, said study co-author Russell Webster, a doctoral student in social psychology at Kansas State University. Webster’s study was published in the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality.  

    Webster had noticed that while some friends loved to read fantasy novels others just hated them -- and he wondered why. One possibility was that people who hated fantasy just didn’t have good imaginations. Another was that people couldn’t accept the rules of an imaginary world and immerse themselves in it.

    So Webster designed some experiments to look at how people experienced fantasy, which he defined as a type of narrative -- such as a book, film, piece of art -- that included supernatural, unreal or impossible aspects. He distinguished fantasy from science fiction because, he says, science fiction tends to come with a logical explanation for the worlds it creates.  

    Webster and his co-author gathered up a group of volunteers and asked them to fill out questionnaires designed to ferret out those who had a tendency to fantasize and daydream.

    Then the researchers ran two similar experiments.

    In the first, volunteers were given one of two narratives to read and think about: one a fantasy, the other realistic. In the fantasy, the writer has acquired the ability to fly and the narrative describes the feeling of soaring over mountains and then coming down and landing on beautiful field of green grass. The realistic narrative describes a sunrise and includes passages that detail the appearance of the sky with colors bursting out from the sun.

    In a second experiment, volunteers were shown and asked to dwell upon one of two paintings: a man sitting in a thatched hut or a man meditating while floating in the air above some mountains.

    After each experiment, the volunteers were asked to describe the images that the narratives sparked. The researchers were surprised to discover that the intensity and vividness of the images had nothing to do with a person’s proneness to flights of fantasy.

    But, there was a clear difference between people who were prone to fantasizing and daydreaming and those who were not. People who were comfortable with fantasy tended to be more absorbed by what they read and saw. They also tended to have an emotional reaction. Many said they felt good after reading the narratives or looking at the paintings.

    Another interesting feature of the fantasy prone people was that even when they were confronted with a realistic narrative or painting, they inserted fantastical elements when they mulled things over. “On their own they began to picture themselves flying while watching the sun rise,” Webster said.

    Webster isn’t sure why it is that some people aren’t comfortable with suspending the rules of reality so they can lose themselves in a fantasy story. That’s a subject for future research he says.

    Do you love the fantasy genre, or hate it? If you love it -- what's your fave?

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  • Study explains why you'll miss your 'Community'

    Lewis Jacobs / Lewis Jacobs/NBC

    We'll miss you most of all, Abed.

    By Melissa Dahl, NBC News

    If you, like "Community's" Abed, sometimes have a hard time differentiating between TV and real life, we have some sad news for you. 

    NBC just announced its midseason lineup -- a schedule that does not include the low-rated but much-loved "Community." (Aaand here's where we must say: Msnbc.com is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)

    Fans on Twitter are already freaking out, even though the show is not being cancelled, and will just be shelved briefly, according to The New York Times. But as we reported back in May, recent research suggests that if you're already mourning the loss of your favorite characters, you're likely not the only one. When a favorite TV show goes off the air, even temporarily, its absence has a real psychological impact on its most fanatical viewers. 

    "We develop these relationships with certain characters," lead study author Emily Moyer-Guse, who's also an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, told me back in May. "We develop them over time -- it's actually part of the normal way we watch and enjoy TV," said Moyer-Guse. "We watch these shows, and we start to think of them like a friend.

    "It’s kind of the same things that drive real relationships with people," she explained. Moyer Guse did her study during the TV writers' strike of 2007 and 2008, when so many shows were briefly off the air. These fans knew their shows were coming back, but they were still sad about even briefly losing them. More from our earlier post:

    (Study participants) were also asked why they watched TV -- for companionship? To relax? To escape? Finally, the students were asked what they did with their newfound free time, now that their shows were off the air.

    People who said they had deeper "friendships" with their favorite TV characters also said they felt lonelier in the characters' absence. And the students who said they watched TV for companionship reported the most distress related to their shows' temporary absences. And, no, people didn't use this break in the TV season to do crazy things like exercise, garden or read -- most said they just watched reruns, or surfed the Internet.

    Are you already sad about "Community's" hiatus? 

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