Failure to Confirm the Rauscher and Shaw Description of Recovery of the Mozart EffectKenneth M. Steele, Joshua D. Brown, and Jaimily A. Stoecker ABSTRACTThe Mozart effect is an increase in spatial reasoning scores detected immediately after listening to the first movement of a Mozart piano sonata. Rauscher and Shaw (1998) suggested that failure to produce a Mozart effect could arise from carryover effects of a spatial reasoning pretest which may interfere with the effect of listening to Mozart. They cited an unpublished study in which a verbal distractor was inserted between the pretest and listening condition, and the manipulation produced the recovery of a Mozart effect. This experiment attempted to confirm the unpublished study. 206 college students were exposed to one of three sequences, pretest-Verbal distractor material-Mozart, pretest-Mozart-Verbal distractor material, and pretestVerbal distractor material. An immediate posttest indicated no significant difference on solution of paper folding and cutting items among the three groups. The results do not support Rauscher and Shaw (1998). Our negative results are consistent with prior failures in other laboratories to produce a Mozart effect.

Researchers have speculated that people's optimism should be associated with their expectations of how they will perform in academic classes. The present study focused on the relationship between college students' optimism and their expectations of how they would perform in an hypothetical university course. Participants were 44 students in introductory psychology. Optimism was measured using the 1994 Revised Life Orientation Test of Carver, Scheier, and Bridges. Students were asked to complete the test, give their cumulative grade-point averages, and predict grades they thought they would receive based on hypothetical course outlines. Planned hierarchical regression, controlling for grade-point average, indicated no relationship between optimism scores and expected grades. There was, however, a correlation between grade expectancies and cumulative grade-point average, suggesting that, in this context, the Revised Life Orientation Test seemed to be measuring students' expectations of how they would perform in the hypothetical course based on their performance in previous courses.

No abstract