All Sounds Made Equal In Melancholy

The room is loud with chatter. Glasses clink. Soft music, perhaps light jazz or strings, fills the air. Amidst all of these background sounds, it can be difficult to understand what an adjacent person is saying. A depressed individual, brought to this cocktail party by a well-meaning friend, can slide further into himself, his inability to hear and communicate compounding his sense of isolation. "A lot of research has suggested that these people with elevated depression symptoms have a bias towards negative perception of information in this kind of environment," said Zilong Xie, a graduate student in the SoundBrain Lab in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Texas at Austin. read more

Read the whole article on

More from