In childhood, musical play is an important part of home life and, potentially, sibling play. Considering the social-emotional relevance of musical activities, siblings' engagement in musical play may also be associated with social development. The current longitudinal study examined musical play in 39 pairs of siblings during naturalistic home play at two time points: (a) when siblings were 2 and 4 years old (T1), and (b) 2 years later when siblings were 4 and 6 years old (T2). Musical play, especially singing and dancing, was more prevalent at T2. Birth order effects were also revealed; 4-year-old second-borns (T2) engaged in more solo musical play than 4-year-old firstborns (T1), but 4-year-old firstborns initiated joint musical play more often than 4-year-old second-borns. Associations between musical play and prosociality also emerged. Specifically, both older and younger siblings' rates of prosociality correlated positively with older sibling musical play at each time point. These findings reveal intriguing effects of age and birth order on both solo and joint musical play between siblings, and highlight a potential link between spontaneous musical play in the home and social development.

Introduction Heart failure (HF) symptoms improve through self-care, for which adherence remains low among patients despite the provision of education for these behaviours by clinical teams. Open Access Digital Community Promoting Self-Care, Peer Support and Health Literacy (ODYSSEE–vCHAT) combines automated digital counselling with social network support to improve mortality and morbidity, engagement with self–care materials, and health-related quality of life. Methods and analysis Use of ODYSSEE-vCHAT via Internet-connected personal computer by 162 HF patients will be compared with a control condition over 22 months. The primary outcome is a composite index score of all-cause mortality, all-cause emergency department visits, and HF-related hospitalisation at trial completion. Secondary outcomes include individual components of the composite index, engagement with self-care materials, and patient-reported measures of physical and psychosocial well-being, disease management, health literacy, and substance use. Patients are recruited from tertiary care hospitals in Toronto, Canada and randomised on a 1:1 ratio to both arms of the trial. Online assessments occur at baseline (t=0), months 4, 8 and 12, and trial completion. Ordinal logistic regression analyses and generalised linear models will evaluate primary and secondary outcomes. Ethics and dissemination The trial has been approved by the research ethics boards at the University Health Network (20-5960), Sunnybrook Hospital (5117), and Mount Sinai Hospital (21-022-E). Informed consent of eligible patients occurs in person or online. Findings will be shared with key stakeholders and the public. Results will allow for the preparation of a Canada-wide phase III trial to evaluate the efficacy of ODYSSEE-vCHAT in improving clinical outcomes and raising the standard of outpatient care. Trial registration number NCT04966104

Music is a highly effective medium for communicating emotional states. Perception of musical emotions is influenced by cues for intensity, such as tempo and loudness, which are readily identified across cultures. Emotion perception is also influenced by cues for the valence, which in Western music is largely communicated through major versus minor mode. How do these music-emotion associations develop? While previous studies have shown preschool children match music with ”happy” and “sad” labels, it is unclear whether judgments are driven by intensity, valence, or both. We adapted Widen and Russell’s (2016) Children’s Scales of Pleasure and Arousal (“CSPA”) to investigate children’s perception of valence and intensity in music (data collected in 2021). Five-year-old children rated excerpts from a corpus of orchestral film music (Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2011) on either valence (N = 29) or intensity (N = 27). We correlated children’s ratings with those of non-musician adults (Eerola & Vuoskoski, 2011). Children’s ratings were positively correlated with adults’ for both scales, p’s < .001, indicating they gleaned both intensity and valence from the music. Results additionally suggested that 5-year-old children use similar musical features to adults to make their judgments. However, correlations were far from perfect, and children’s valence judgments were affected by the breadth of their exposure to musical cultures. Results show that musical emotion perception has an extended developmental trajectory, and point to the CSPA as a tool for testing children in a way that better informs contemporary theories of music emotion perception.