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Mehr's research is primarily focused on the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of music. He has conducted extensive studies on how and why music is a universal phenomenon across cultures. One area of his research involved assembling archival recordings from 319 societies from around the
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and is currently an
Associate Professor Adjunct at Yale University Child Study Center and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland where he leads a lab focused on exploring the intersections of music, culture, and cognitive development.
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are expressed cross-culturally across the globe in both industrialized and non-industrialized societies and carry similar properties regardless of location. He argues that the evolution of such signals may have been reflected in the context of an
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along three primary dimensions related to each song's respective formality, arousal, and religiosity. Mehr and colleagues also experimentally showed that individual listeners carry assess these songs along similar dimensions in both
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world to create a database titled The
Natural History of Song. Examining 5,000 songs, Mehr and colleagues examined that several forms of song, namely love songs, dance songs, lullabies, and songs of healing
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Another key area of Mehr's research is the impact of music on child development. His work in this domain examined the role that
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may have on infant development, finding no spillover effects of a musical education on non-musical cognitive development.
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at the
University of Rochester, where he received a Bachelor of Music in Music Education in 2010. Mehr completed his
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313:"30 Top Thinkers Under 30: The Multi-Instrumentalist Who Wants to Understand Why People Make Music"
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236:"Yale Child Study Center welcomes former Haskins Laboratories faculty and trainees"
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222:"2023 Winner of Te Puiaki Kaipūtaiao Maea the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize"
388:"Where is the love? Musical recognition crosses cultures — with an exception"
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Mehr also showed that vocal signatures of infant-directed care, such as
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Director's Early
Independence Award in 2017, both for his work on the
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360:"A Study Suggests That People Can Hear Universal Traits in Music"
411:"'Parentese' Is Truly a Lingua Franca, Global Study Finds"
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is a New
Zealand cognitive scientist specialising in
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Prime
Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize
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Academic staff of
Victoria University of Wellington
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468:. University of Washington. February 24, 2017
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550:Academic staff of the University of Auckland
261:"Samuel Mehr: Unravelling music's mysteries"
540:Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni
338:"Exploring the Universality of Human Song"
107:Mehr was the recipient of the New Zealand
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437:"Baby Talk: Parenting Language Research"
135:in Human Development and Education from
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555:21st-century New Zealand psychologists
435:Garcia-Navarro, Lulu (July 23, 2022).
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311:Williams, Maxwell (April 14, 2014).
560:21st-century American psychologists
520:American expatriates in New Zealand
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287:"2017 Awardees | NIH Common Fund"
156:Victoria University of Wellington
154:Mehr has served as a Lecturer at
139:in 2017 under the mentorship of
487:Span, Paula (August 15, 2018).
409:Whang, Oliver (July 24, 2022).
92:, cross-cultural research, and
535:Eastman School of Music alumni
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565:American cognitive scientists
113:National Institutes of Health
42:Senior Lecturer in Psychology
16:American cognitive scientist
489:"Singing With My Grandbaby"
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195:parent-offspring conflict
177:and non-WEIRD societies.
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59:Developmental Psychology
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90:developmental psychology
129:Eastman School of Music
102:Yale Child Study Center
265:University of Auckland
191:evolutionary arms race
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462:"The making of music"
96:. He is based at the
57:Cognitive Psychology
530:Psychology educators
111:in 2023, and the US
69:University Auckland
390:. September 7, 2023
117:psychology of music
86:auditory perception
493:The New York Times
415:The New York Times
368:. January 25, 2018
340:. December 3, 2019
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170:clustered together
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208:References
39:Occupation
186:baby talk
182:lullabies
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