Musical group interaction (MGI) is a complex social setting requiring certain cognitive skills that may also elicit shared psychological states. We argue that many MGI-specific features may also be important for emotional empathy, the ability to experience another person's emotional state. We thus hypothesized that long-term repeated participation in MGI could help enhance a capacity for emotional empathy even outside of the musical context, through a familiarization with and refinement of MGI empathy-promoting musical components (EPMCs). We tested this hypothesis by designing an MGI programme for primary school children consisting of interactive musical games implementing various EPMCs. We ran the programme for an entire school year and compared the emotional empathy of MGI children to control children using existing and novel measures of empathy before and after the programme. Our results support our hypothesis: MGI children showed higher emotional empathy scores after the study compared to its beginning, and higher scores than control children at the end of the study. These findings shed new light on the emotional processes involved in musical interaction and highlight the remarkable potential of MGI for promoting positive social-emotional capacities such as empathy.

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This paper describes what improvising came to mean to a group of 12-year-old children who, as members of a weekly lunchtime`Music Creators' Soundings Club', were watched, listened to, and invited to re¯ect upon the process of group improvisation. Focusing on musical interaction as it emerged in the earliest stages of this work, this paper shows the relationship between children's actions and their re¯ective talk. It identi®es emerging principles in a sequence of musical examples that portray children making music together and shows the nature of group improvisation as socially and musically inclusive. These children valued group improvisation most for its immediacy and continuity. Ways of delighting in how children behave musically and reveal their musical learning through conversation are discussed.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractIn the UK there have been concerns that some primary teachers lack the necessary skills to teach the National Curriculum. The aim of this research was to ascertain the level of confidence of students completing a one-year primary teacher training programme in relation to teaching in general and teaching music in particular. 341 students from four higher education institutions in the UK completed a short questionnaire. While almost all teachers had confidence in their ability to teach only about half were confident about teaching music. There were statistically significant differences in response depending on whether the students played one or more musical instruments. Instrumentalists were more confident, those playing more than one instrument exhibiting the highest levels. Most students believed that more time should be spent on training, although they praised its quality. The implications of the findings are discussed and alternative ways of addressing the problem are considered.