Developmental change and cross‐domain links in vocal and musical emotion recognition performance in childhood

Abstract

Although the configurations of psychoacoustic cues signalling emotions in human vocalizations and instrumental music are very similar, cross-domain links in recognition performance have yet to be studied developmentally. Two hundred and twenty 5- to 10-year-old children were asked to identify musical excerpts and vocalizations as happy, sad, or fearful. The results revealed age-related increases in overall recognition performance with significant correlations across vocal and musical conditions at all developmental stages. Recognition scores were greater for musical than vocal stimuli and were superior in females compared with males. These results confirm that recognition of emotions in vocal and musical stimuli is linked by 5 years and that sensitivity to emotions in auditory stimuli is influenced by age and gender.

Individual Differences in Music-Perceived Emotions

“…For example, Bouhuys and colleagues (1995) demonstrated that induced sad mood leads to an increased perception of sadness in ambiguous emotional expressions. Furthermore, there is some evidence for sex differences, with female children and adults being more sensitive to nonverbal emotion cues than male children and adults (e.g., Allgood & Heaton, 2015;Briton & Hall, 1995). With regard to verbal expression, research suggests that younger participants are more sensitive to emotional voices than older participants (Allen & Brosgole, 1993;Brosgole & Weisman, 1995;Kiss & Ennis, 2001;Orbelo, Grim, Talbott, & Ross, 2005;Paulmann, Pell, & Kotz, 2008).…”

Categorical emotion recognition from voice improves during childhood and adolescence

“…They observed a substantial increase in correct recognition with age, with only minor differences across emotion categories. More recently, Allgood and Heaton 48 used affect bursts, that is, short non-verbal vocal expressions such as laughter, weeping or scream 49 , 50 . They tested 228 children aged between 5 and 10 years and observed that 5- years old were significantly worse than 10-years old children when categorizing these stimuli as happy, sad or fearful.…”

“…In a subsequent study, they used meaningless sentences in different languages in a similar design and observed that early adolescents (age 11–13, n = 32) were not better than children (age 8–10, n = 25) at discriminating emotions, while they performed more poorly than adults (age 19–35, n = 22) 46 . Amongst these studies Allgood and Heaton 48 and Chronaki and et al . 27 observed a gender effect, consisting of better performance of females, albeit with apparently no interaction with age.…”

“… 47 used the same procedure. Allgood and Heaton 48 tested participants in groups in the classroom, playing the sounds on loudspeakers and asking children to circle, on a scoring sheet, the cartoon face corresponding to the emotion they though was displayed. Lastly, Chronaki et al .…”

“… 47 , Chronaki et al . 27 ; Allgood and Heaton 48 showing that recognition of emotion from non-linguistic vocalization improves throughout childhood. Further, we hypothesized that this improvement continues during adolescence.…”