Katherine Cotter has published a new paper titled, “Musical minds: Personality, schizotypy, and involuntary musical imagery” in the journal Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain. The work is co-authored with fellow social psychology graduate student Alex Christensen and Faculty Advisor, Dr. Paul Silvia. Access the abstract here.

The paper examines the relation between personality, schizotypy, and a newly developed involuntary musical imagery measure, the Involuntary Musical Imagery Scale (IMIS). The findings indicate that openness to experience, neuroticism, and positive schizotypy are related to aspects of involuntary musical imagery experience.

Katherine is a second year graduate student in the social psychology MA/PhD program. Broadly, her research interests center on people’s perceptions of their experience with musical imagery (i.e., hearing music in their heads), the nature of mental control in music imagery, and the use of experience sampling methods to examine art and creativity-related phenomena in a daily life context.