This is Improbable Too

by Marc Abrahams

  Here are verbatim snippets, which I present in the form of a mixed-metaphor story. It begins, of course, with two favourite animals.

  Strong bears came out of the woods determined to drag the market down.

  The bears had their claws firmly dug in and were not letting go.

  Optimists saw the makings of a baby bull, but naysayers warned it could be a bum steer … after last year’s grizzly bear market.

  Speculators played a cat and mouse game with stocks.

  The stock remained a dog.

  Investors [ran] like a herd of startled gazelles.

  The market was very nervous.

  The market was having trouble focusing on issues.

  Sick dollar … groggy dollar … dollar cringes.

  The market was suffering vertigo.

  The market started to drift and lose direction.

  [The market] precariously balanced on the 10,050 mark.

  The index hovered.

  [The market was] losing its footing.

  The index fell off the cliff.

  The Hang Seng Index dropped like a brick. [This one’s a simile. I know, I know.]

  [The] index continued its tailspin.

  The market seemed to have come out of its free fall.

  Stock prices took a roller coast ride and ended up in the subway.

  The bounce was more technical than substantial.

  Those hoping for a big rebound to catapult it out of this bear trap would probably be disappointed.

  The question every trader will be asking himself this week is: just how high can a dead cat bounce?

  Surveying the hotchpotch of stock phrases and market-driving hype, Smith sighs: ‘Rarely do commentators say “These events are totally unpredictable; I haven’t the slightest idea what caused them to occur.” ’

  The possibility flaunts itself that no one quite understands what the stock market’s doing. If that’s the case, everyone’s unlikely to come up with metaphors that truly fit. But that won’t stop them from trying. Smith tells us why at the end of his report: ‘A group with a significant stake in the maintenance of an impression of certainty are the financial “gurus” whose words and actions can have profound effects on the way markets move … To a lesser extent, a host of commentators, analysts and advisers benefit from the illusion that market events are controlled and rational and can be explained and predicted.’

  Smith, Geoff P. (1995). ‘How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market’. Hong Kong Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 18: 43–57.

  In brief

  ‘On What I Do Not Understand (and Have Something to Say), Part I’

  by Saharon Shelah (published in Fundamenta Mathematicae, 2000)

  An academic view on emotional baggage

  Until 1997, lost luggage just sat there, ignored, while scholars focused on other subjects. Then Klaus R. Scherer and Grazia Ceschi of the University of Geneva went to an airport and took a hard look at the emotions engendered by luggage loss.

  Scherer and Ceschi used hidden cameras, microphones and survey forms to record people’s reactions to learning that their luggage was lost. Their report, called ‘Lost Luggage: A Field Study of Emotion–Antecedent Appraisal’, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, concerns 112 luggage-deprived passengers. It looks at several questions.

  QUESTION ONE: When airline passengers discover that their baggage is lost, which emotions do they feel, and with what intensity?

  The researchers focused on five basic emotions: anger, resignation, indifference worry and good humour. They tried to measure the intensity of each of these twice – first before and then after the passengers spoke with an airport baggage agent. The study presents the data in a series of tables and graphs, which culminate in an image labelled ‘Component loadings in a three-dimensional solution produced by nonlinear canonical correlation of appraisal dimensions and emotion ratings’.

  QUESTION TWO: Can the emotional reactions reported by these airline passengers help prove or disprove one of the fundamental tenets of a theory called ‘Appraisal Theory’?

  Specifically, Scherer and Ceschi want to know what these luggage-loss emotions can tell us about ‘the notion that objectively similar events or situations will elicit dissimilar patterns of emotional reactions in different individuals, due to variable appraisal patterns’. It’s a subtle question, but Scherer and Ceschi find a simple, clear answer. Appraisal Theory, they conclude, is not yet up to snuff. It will need some tinkering before it can adequately explain how airline passengers react after learning that their luggage has gone missing.

  QUESTION THREE: Once a baggage agent enters the picture, how does he or she affect the passenger’s luggage-loss-related emotions?

  This is the question they ask, and it may be an important question, but Scherer and Ceschi are really after something deeper. What they really want to know, they say, is what happens in the end. What emotion will passengers feel after they have (a) lost their luggage, and then (b) talked with an airport baggage agent, and then (c) decided how well (or how badly) the whole baggage retrieval service worked?

  The answer, say Scherer and Ceschi, is that people ‘tended to be less angry and/or sad if they were satisfied with the performance of the retrieval service’, or if the airport baggage agent made ‘a positive impression’ on them.

  The researchers were surprised by the strong extent of what they call ‘emotion blending’. The unfortunate passengers often felt more than pure anger or resignation or worry. Sometimes they felt both anger and resignation, or both anger and worry.

  Scherer and Ceschi welcome such unexpected discoveries. And so they offer a suggestion for their fellow social scientists. Actually seeing how people behave, they write, can ‘widen the perspective’. It’s a ‘corrective against the self-insulation tendencies’ of relying too much on theories about how people behave.

  Scherer, Klaus R., and Grazia Ceschi (1997). ‘Lost Luggage: A Field Study of Emotion–Antecedent Appraisal’. Motivation and Emotion 21 (3): 211–35.

  — (2000). ‘Criteria for Emotion Recognition from Verbal and Nonverbal Expression: Studying Baggage Loss in the Airport’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26 (3): 327–39.

  Oboe, solo

  ‘Dangerous Trends in Oboe Playing’ burst into print in 1973, a fiery warning for all to see.

  Melvin Berman, then a professor of oboe and chamber music at the University of Toronto, daringly discussed – openly, in public – a problem that threatened his tradition-bound minority community. Publishing in the Journal of the International Double Reed Society, he wrote: ‘The American oboist is being branded as an in-bred, dull and insensitive technician by most of the world’s orchestral musicians and many of the world’s finest conductors … Something is desperately wrong and everyone, except the oboists, knows what it is. Now, I think it’s time for the oboists to find out.’

  This was the roiling societal ferment of the 1960s, at last and after a delay of several years reaching into even the tiniest and most isolated of social groups. It was also a cri de coeur: ‘We have forgotten, or refuse to accept the fact that there are other schools of playing, other approaches to the oboe, other methods of making reeds, which deserve and have at least as wide an acceptance as our own … We are taught to laugh at the English vibrato, smirk at the German sound, ridicule the French brightness.’ The solution, insisted Professor Berman, was ‘to liberate ourselves from the restrictive attitudes imposed upon us by certain elements of the past generation’.

  The Berman article appeared at a peculiar moment. The oboe community had just been confronted and transfixed by a challenge to its deepest values. This, of course, was the appearance of the Italian composer Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VII, a piece written for solo oboe. So novel was it that two decades passed before a scholar, Cason A. Duke of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, described it coherently: ‘a single note held as a drone by the au
dience throughout the piece’. (Berio later reworked the composition as Sequenza VIIb for soprano saxophone.)

  The oboists were not unique in feeling isolated. That same issue of the Journal of the International Double Reed Society also contained a revealing study by the Austrian bassoonist Hugo Burghauser. He described the loneliness of bassoonists, and also the physically painful reality of their existence.

  Burghauser’s writing is intensely personal: ‘I was often asked why I chose to play the bassoon. The answer is simple and might be the same for many other bassoonists: in my youth, students for this instrument were very scarce so when I wanted to enter the Vienna Conservatory the Dean of this prominent Academie offered me every course free of all tuition if only I would take up the bassoon.’

  Burghauser – and his fellows’ – pain shines through in passages such as this one: ‘Many years ago also, there was the experience in Europe of manufacturing reeds from steel. They sounded beautiful, spoke easily and lasted of course for a very long time, with but one hitch – after five minutes playing a splitting headache resulted!’

  Berman, Melvin (1973). ‘Dangerous Trends in Oboe Playing’. Journal of the International Double Reed Society 1 (1): n.p.

  Burghauser, Hugo (1973). ‘Philharmonic Adventures with Bassoon’. Journal of the International Double Reed Society 1 (1): n.p.

  Berman, Melvin (1988). Art of Oboe Reed Making. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

  Duke, Cason A. (2001). ‘A Performer’s Guide to Theatrical Elements in Selected Trombone Literature’. Thesis, School of Music, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, May.

  Thatcher, interrupted

  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s masterful way of handling interruptions inspired one psychologist to study, intently, how she did it. As this scholar communicated his findings to the public, other scholars, with different views, interrupted him – and he them.

  Geoffrey Beattie is a professorial research fellow of the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester. Or rather, was – the 12 November 2012 issue of the Manchester Evening News quotes ‘a university spokesman’ as saying: ‘We can confirm Geoff Beattie has been dismissed from the university for gross misconduct following a disciplinary hearing.’ In 1982, however, while he was at the University of Sheffield, Beattie published two studies about Thatcher.

  The first, in the journal Semiotica, says: ‘Mrs Thatcher’s interviews display a distinctive pattern – she is typically interrupted more frequently than other senior politicians, and she is interrupted more often by interviewers than she herself interrupts … Butting-in interruptions … occur where her interviewer interrupts but fails to get the floor.’

  From ‘Why Is Mrs Thatcher Interrupted So Often?’

  The second study, called ‘Why Is Mrs Thatcher Interrupted So Often?’, appears in the journal Nature. Beattie (and two colleagues) analysed how Thatcher deployed her voice, words and gaze when Denis Tuohy interviewed her on the television programme TV Eye. The study explains that most people use fairly standard cues with each other, as to when each will stop or start talking. But, it explains: ‘Many interruptions in an interview with Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, occur at points where independent judges agree that her turn appears to have finished. It is suggested that she is unconsciously displaying turn-yielding cues at certain inappropriate points.’

  Peter Bull and Kate Mayer of the University of York disagreed. They and Beattie argued, slowly, in public, mostly in the pages of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology. In 1988, Bull and Mayer wrote a treatise called ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Study of Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock’, saying their ‘results were quite contrary to what might have been expected from the work of Beattie’. Beattie replied with ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Reply to Bull and Mayer’.

  Then, a year later, Bull and Mayer countered with ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Reply to Beattie’. And Beattie responded with ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: The Debate Ends?’.

  Bull and Mayer, four years later, published a study called ‘How Not to Answer Questions in Political Interviews’. After that, the conversation dwindled.

  But Beattie did not shy away from studying interruptive behaviour. He wrote a book called On The Ropes: Boxing as a Way of Life. A reviewer, in the journal Aggressive Behavior, contended that the book is a knuckle-cracking good read, that it ‘takes you into a world where respect has nothing to do with your publication record or letters after your name, but with your ability to take a punch without letting on that you are hurt. Geoffrey gives a wonderful description of what it is like to be on the receiving end of an accomplished sparring partner.’

  Beattie, Geoffrey W. (1982). ‘Turn-taking and Interruption in Political Interviews: Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan Compared and Contrasted’. Semiotica 29 (1/2): 93–114.

  —, Anne Cutler and Mark Pearson (1982). ‘Why Is Mrs Thatcher Interrupted So Often?’. Nature 300 (23/30 December): 744–7.

  Bull, Peter, and Kate Mayer (1988). ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Study of Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 7 (1): 35–46.

  Beattie, Geoffrey (1989). ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Reply to Bull and Mayer’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 8 (5): 327–39.

  Bull, Peter, and Kate Mayer (1989). ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: A Reply to Beattie’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 8 (5): 341–4.

  Beattie, Geoffrey (1989). ‘Interruptions in Political Interviews: The Debate Ends?’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 8 (5): 345–8.

  Bull, Peter, and Kate Mayer (1993). ‘How Not to Answer Questions in Political Interviews’. Political Psychology 14 (4): 651–66.

  Beattie, Geoffrey (1996). On the Ropes: Boxing as a Way of Life. London: Victor Gollancz.

  Archer, John (1997). ‘Book Review: On the Ropes: Boxing as a Way of Life, by Geoffrey Beattie’. Aggressive Behavior 23 (3): 215–6.

  Research spotlight

  ‘The Demise of “Yes”: An Informal Look’

  by John W. Trinkaus (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997)

  The author explains: ‘For affirmative responses to simple interrogatories, the use of “absolutely” and “exactly” may be becoming more socially frequent than “yes”. A counting of positive replies to 419 questions on several TV networks showed 249 answers of “absolutely”, 117 “exactly”, and 53 of “yes”.’

  Harmonious results

  Despite what you may have heard, acoustical analysis suggests that (1) most people are not horrible singers, and (2) most horrible singers are not tone deaf – they’re just horrible singers.

  In 2007, Isabelle Peretz and Jean-François Giguère of the University of Montreal, and Simone Dalla Bella, of the University of Finance and Management in Warsaw, tested the abilities of sixty-two ‘nonmusicians’ in Quebec who admitted to being ‘occasional singers’.

  The very act of testing proved more difficult than Dalla Bella, Giguère and Peretz had heard it would be. Still, they published their report, in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, called ‘Singing Proficiency in the General Population’. They complain, to anyone who will listen, that it is not easy to measure the goodness or badness of singing. There is ‘no consensus’, they seem to wail, ‘on how to obtain … objective measures of singing proficiency in sung melodies’.

  They devised their own test, using the refrain from a song called ‘Gens du Pays’, which people in Quebec commonly sing as part of their ritual to celebrate a birthday. That refrain, they explain, has thirty-two notes, a vocal range of less than one octave, and a stable tonal centre.

  These scientists went to a public park, where they used a clever subterfuge to recruit test subjects: ‘The experimenter pretended that it was his birthday and that he had made a bet with friends that he could get 100 individuals e
ach to sing the refrain of Gens du Pays for him on this special occasion.’

  The resulting recordings became the raw material for intensive computer-based analysis, centring on the vowel sounds – the ‘i’ in ‘mi’, for example. Peretz, Giguère and Dalla Bella assessed each performance for pitch stability, number of pitch interval errors, ‘changes in pitch directions relative to musical notation’, interval deviation, number of time errors, temporal variability and timing consistency. For comparison, they recorded and assessed several professional singers performing the same snatch of song.

  Peretz, Giguère and Dalla Bella give a cheery assessment of the untrained, off-the-street singers: ‘We found that the majority of individuals can carry a tune with remarkable proficiency. Occasional singers typically sing in time, but are less accurate in pitch as compared to professional singers. When asked to slow down, occasional singers greatly improve in performance, making as few pitch errors as professional singers.’ Only a very few, they say, were ‘clearly out of tune’.

  The scientists then focused on two of the horrid singers. Both screechers were ‘aware that they sang out of tune’. They proved to be almost the opposite of tone deaf. When tested, they ‘correctly detected 90% and 96% of pitch deviations in a melodic context’.

  Peretz has continued to study the mystery of poor singing. In 2012, she and her colleague Sean Hutchins finished a comprehensive study. Harmoniously with the earlier finding, they conclude that most bad singers are good at hearing fine sounds, and bad at making them.

  Dalla Bella, Simone, Jean-François Giguère and Isabelle Peretz (2007). ‘Singing Proficiency in the General Population’. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 121 (2): 1182–9.