In Marilyn Boltz’s original vision of her future, she saw herself presiding before audiences in a concert hall, not students in a classroom.
The professor of psychology, whose research on time estimation behavior, psychomusicology, and social cognition has been widely published, had played piano since the age of five and harbored hopes of becoming a concert pianist. As an undergraduate, she enrolled as a music major, but soon faced a harsh revelation: “I realized that although I was competent, I was not outstanding or stellar and would never make it in that profession.” (Of course, she had no way of knowing that music would one day play a key role in her academic research.)
Boltz switched her major to French for a while, but a junior-year psycholinguistics course finally pointed her towards the right path. “I thought, ‘This is it, this is my niche,’” she says. “It encompassed all of my interests, especially language and music; the structure of music and speech are remarkably similar; which is not that surprising when you think about the way sound and speech are produced. The voice is an instrument and in a sense, speech can be conceptualized as a type of music.” She was also attracted to the sciences in general, not just the mode of analytical thought but also the empirical method that allows her to test the validity of her ideas.
Boltz’s interest in the psychology of time was sparked in a rather unorthodox manner. During her senior year of college, she was studying for final exams in the university library and took a break for a short walk; when she returned, she found that someone had left a volume of T.S. Eliot’s poetry in her carrel. She opened the book to the first poem of the volume, “Burnt Norton,” which concerns time: “I thought it was the most incredible thing I had ever read. It’s still my favorite poem.” She developed an independent study on the nature of time and read everything she could on the subject, including a paper called “Time: Our Lost Dimension” by a professor at Ohio State University. Boltz admired the woman’s ideas on how individuals experience time and arranged a meeting with the professor to discuss her research further. Subsequently, Boltz applied and was accepted to a Ph.D. program in psychology at Ohio State and gained a mentor in the professor, who, it turned out, was also interested in the psychology of music. Boltz was formally trained in the latter but wrote her dissertation on time, seeking to discover how accurately people judge the duration of a specific event and what circumstances might distort that judgment.
After she joined Haverford’s faculty in 1987, Boltz continued to explore facets of time estimation behavior and those factors that determine one’s ability to correctly judge the duration of an event. Some of these factors have involved the notion of an “internal tempo”—the characteristic rate at which an individual walks, talks, drives, etc.—and how this can be altered by environmental stressors to distort one’s sense of time. In other research, she has investigated the influence of expectancies as well as the degree of predictability inherent to an event’s structure.
Boltz applied her research to the courtroom in 1995, when lawyers from the U.S. Department of Labor sought her expertise in a case regarding the amount of back pay due to workers at a Midwestern meat-packing plant. On the stand, Boltz explained how a person’s familiarity with a specific task increases his or her ability to accurately judge the duration of that task, and government lawyers successfully argued that the workers had correctly estimated the amount of hours owed to them in back pay.
Currently, Boltz still pursues her studies in the psychology of time, but has extended her interests to the area of social cognition and the role that the timing characteristics of speech may play in social attribution and impression formation processes. In a recent set of studies, she has focused on response latency behavior (the time interval between a speaker’s question and a listener’s response) to determine whether the timing of responses can be used to make certain assumptions about people. What Boltz wants to know is: Is there an optimal response time that conveys maximum credibility? How long—or short—a latency implies dishonesty in the responder? Does a similar process apply to other attributes such as the perceived confidence of an individual?
To test her theories, Boltz composed dialogues to reflect four different types of speaker characteristics: certainty or commitment, honesty, compliance with a request, and confidence. The dialogues consisted of questions and one-word responses, usually “yes” or “no.” Test subjects listened to the pre-recorded exchanges and formed impressions of the answering parties based on the timing of their responses.
In most of the dialogues, Boltz found that there were a wide range of acceptable response latencies that could create a favorable impression of the speaker, but in the case of the dialogues representing honesty, the range was much narrower. “With honesty, both short and long latencies created unfavorable impressions,” she says. “An intermediate value was considered most honest, and anything longer or shorter than that was thought to be a lie.”
In a subsequent study, Boltz tried to understand the determining factors behind optimum response latency—is it based on linguistic context, speech rate, a shorter latency for faster-speaking people? She manipulated these characteristics and found that listeners adopted the speaker’s pause duration as the referent for response timing. For honesty, the most credible responses were ones equal to the pause duration itself, and any latency shorter or longer than this value was perceived as deceptive. In the remaining speech acts of confidence, certainty, and compliance, the most positive impressions were associated with latencies shorter than the speaker’s pause duration—any value greater than this led to more negative evaluations.
The idea that listeners adopt the timing characteristics of their conversational partner illustrates a phenomenon known as “speaker accommodation” in which people adopt similar speaking styles over the course of a conversation. The presence of accommodation has been found to contribute a sense of rapport between individuals and Boltz’s research suggests that it can also play a role in the types of inferences we make about a person.
As she continues her social cognition research, Boltz is examining the roles of voices and faces and their degree of congruency with one another: “Does a person look the way you’d expect him or her to appear based on qualities of their voice?” In one set of studies she has contrasted “baby” faces” with more mature ones. “Baby-faced adults are thought to be more dependent, less responsible, less confident, but warmer and more approachable,” she says, “while mature-faced people are considered responsible, independent, and confident, but colder. When a conflicting voice and face are paired, do they cancel each other out? Would one modality have a bigger effect than the other?” In tests, subjects are presented with face/voice stimuli and asked to make trait judgments based on appearance and vocal characteristics. When the two did not match—for example, a young, high-pitched voice paired with an older face—participants in the test weighed the voice more heavily in making a personality assessment. Voice also distorted the memory of a face: if someone tried to recall a mature-faced man with a childlike voice, the man’s face is misremembered as younger than it actually is.
“This is one of the few cases where the auditory modality dominates,” says Boltz.
She has also found a way to blend her musical background and her academic pursuits by studying the influence of background music on film viewers. “It’s well-known that music can influence the emotional impact of a scene, but does it also allow viewers to make inferences about a character’s personality, motivations and intentions, or inter-relationships with others?” she says. To address this question, she showed groups of college students ambiguous scenes from various films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which Jimmy Stewart’s character follows Grace Kelly around San Francisco with a mysterious purpose. For one group, the scenes were presented with positive music; the second group heard a negative score; and the third group watched the scenes with no musical accompaniment. The first group, swayed by the uplifting soundtrack, interpreted Stewart as a long-lost lover seeking a reunion, while the group exposed to dark, ominous music saw him as a hit man or murderer. Members of the third group, with no music to influence their judgment, expressed both of these opinions.
"It's helpful for directors, because they don't have to spell everything out through the actor's dialogue," says Boltz. "They can use music to help the audiences make inferences."