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This study represents an interdisciplinary investigation of music cognition from both theoretical and empirical perspectives drawing principally from research in neuropsychology, and philosophy. The main aim of the thesis is to produce a coherent model of music cognition, reconciling empirical findings, current accounts of musical expression, and broader cognitive models. With this aim the investigation divides into two parts: first, examining musical expression of emotion, and second, exploring music cognition as a whole and its place within global models of cognition. A particular focus is the subdivision and independence of music subsystems, notably the separation of music and language and to what extent these are functionally, and neuro-anatomically separate cognitive systems.

This thesis describes a series of studies that investigated sources of individual differences in face preferences. Chapter 1 summarises previous work identifying the visual parameters that influence the attractiveness of faces (e.g., sexual dimorphism, symmetry, averageness, apparent health) and discusses sources of individual differences in face preferences (e.g., menstrual cycle phase, own attractiveness, visual adaptation). Chapter 2 and 3 report a series of 3 studies that investigated the role that changes in testosterone level might play in cyclic (Chapter 2) and diurnal (Chapter 3) variation in women’s preferences for masculinity in men’s faces.  Chapter 4 and 5 examined the relationship between reported general (i.e., trait) sex drive and women’s masculinity preferences (Chapter 4) and current (i.e., state) sexual motivation and women’s masculinity preferences (Chapter 5).  Chapter 6 describes a study that tested for positive association between inter-individual variation in testosterone levels and women’s masculinity preferences.  The final experiment chapter (Chapter 7) investigated whether aversions to facial cues of illness (e.g., pallor) reflect contagion avoidance behaviour by testing for an association between individual differences in perceived vulnerability to disease and aversions to facial cues of illness.  The findings described in this thesis are evidence that testosterone level, sex drive/sexual motivation and perceived vulnerability to disease are sources of potentially adaptive variation in face preferences.

Selective attention is widely regarded as a crucial component of human perception. In the visual domain, attentional mechanisms have been implicated in stimulus encoding, implicit recognition, conscious perception and goal-directed behaviour. To date, however, the role of attention in face processing has been largely overlooked. This is remarkable given the social and biological importance of faces, and the wealth of psychological research that has focused on faces as stimuli. Moreover, if we are to better understand how the human brain processes faces, then this would also require an insight into the interaction between attention and face processing. The experiments in this thesis addressed the relation of attention and face processing directly by assessing the consequences of various attentional manipulations in response-competition and repetition priming tasks. The first line of enquiry examined observers’ ability to attend selectively to facial expression and identity, and whether attention is required for the integration of these types of information into a multi-dimensional face percept. Subsequent experiments examined capacity limits in face processing and attention biases to faces and nonface comparisons. The main findings indicated that face processing is capacity limited, such that only a single face can be processed at a time, and that faces are particularly efficient at retaining and engaging visual attention in comparison to nonface objects. However, while face processing limits appear to proceed independent of a general capacity, attention biases to faces may reflect processing stages that are shared with other stimuli. These findings are discussed in relation to existing research on faces and attention.

This research aimed to explore whether the recognition of offenders with a concealed firearm by a human operator might be based on the recognition of affective (negative) state derived from non-verbal behaviour that is accessible from CCTV images. Since a firearm is concealed, it has been assumed that human observers would respond to subtle cues which individuals inherently produce whilst carrying a hidden firearm. These cues are believed to be reflected in the body language of those carrying firearms and might be apprehended by observers at a conscious or subconscious level. Another hypothesis is that the ability to recognize the carrier of concealed firearm in the CCTV footage might be affected by other factors, such as the skills in decoding an affective state of others and the viewpoint of observation of the surveillance targets. In order to give a theoretical and experimental basis for these hypotheses the first objective was to examine the extant literature to determine what is known about recognition of affect from non-verbal cues (e.g. facial expressions and body movement), and how it can be applied to the detection of human mal-intent. A second objective was to explore this subject in relation to the detection of concealed firearm carrying through performing a number of experimental studies. The studies employed experts, i.e. CCTV operators and mainly the lay people as participants. Also, various experimental techniques such as questionnaires and eye-tracking registration were used to investigate the topic. The results show that human observers seem to use visual indicators of affective state of surveillance targets to make a decision whether or not the individuals are carrying a concealed firearm. The most prominent cues were face, and upper body of surveillance targets, gait, posture and arm movements. The test of decoding ability did not show sufficient relationship with the ability to detect a concealed firearm bearer. The performance on the task might be view dependent. Further research into this topic will be needed to generate strategies that would support reliable detection of concealed firearm carrying through employing of related affective behavioural cues.

Les postures corporelles signalant domination ou soumission servent une fonction de communication chez les humains et d’autres animaux. La question de savoir si l'adoption de telles "postures de pouvoir" influence la perception et le comportement de l'agent fait actuellement l'objet d'un débat. Le travail réalisé pendant cette thèse consistait à explorer les effets de ces postures sur des comportements étroitement liés à leur fonction primaire, à savoir la communication sociale, en se focalisant sur les réponses aux visages, signaux sociaux particulièrement saillants. Dans une série d'expériences, j'ai utilisé des méthodes de corrélation inverse pour visualiser les représentations mentales de traits préférés du visage. Les représentations mentales des visages préférés implicitement et explicitement évoquaient une impression affiliative et légèrement dominante, mais ne révélaient aucun effet reproductible des postures. Deux autres expériences distinctes ont étudié les effets de la posture sur la perception d’expressions faciales menaçantes et sur les comportements d'approche ou d'évitement en réponse à ces signaux. Bien que les postures n'aient pas d’influence sur la reconnaissance explicite d’expressions faciales menaçantes, elles ont un impact sur les décisions d'approcher ou d'éviter des signaux de menace. Plus précisément, l'adoption d'une posture de soumission augmentait la tendance à éviter les personnes exprimant la colère. Enfin, une tentative de réplication des effets des postures sur les niveaux de testostérone et de cortisol a démontré que même l'adoption répétée d'une posture de pouvoir en contexte social ne provoque pas de changements hormonaux. Dans l'ensemble, ces résultats suggèrent que notre posture corporelle n’influence pas nos représentations mentales et notre perception des autres individus, mais pourrait influencer nos actions en réponse aux signaux sociaux. / Expansive and constrictive body postures serve a primary communicative function in humans and other animals by signalling power and dominance. Whether adopting such “power postures” influences the agent’s own perception and behaviour is currently a subject of debate. In this PhD thesis, I explored effects of adopting power postures on behaviours closely related to the postures’ primary function of social signalling by focusing on responses to faces as particularly salient social signals. In a series of experiments, I utilized reverse correlation methods to visualize mental representations of preferred facial traits. Mental representations of implicitly as well as explicitly preferred faces evoked an affiliative and slightly dominant impression, but revealed no replicable effects of power postures. Two further separate experiments investigated posture effects on the perception of threatening facial expressions, and approach vs. avoidance actions in response to such social signals. While postures did not influence explicit recognition of threatening facial expressions, they affected approach and avoidance actions in response to them. Specifically, adopting a constrictive posture increased the tendency to avoid individuals expressing anger. Finally, an attempt to replicate posture effects on levels of testosterone and cortisol demonstrated that even repeatedly adopting a power posture in a social context does not elicit hormonal changes. Altogether, these findings suggest that our body posture does not influence our mental representations and perception of other people’s faces per se, but could influence our actions in response to social signals.