Emotional experience in music fosters 18‐month‐olds' emotion–action understanding: a training study

Abstract

We examine whether emotional experiences induced via music-making promote infants' use of emotional cues to predict others' action. Fifteen-month-olds were randomly assigned to participate in interactive emotion training either with or without musical engagement for three months. Both groups were then re-tested with two violation-of-expectation paradigms respectively assessing their sensitivity to some expressive features in music and understanding of the link between emotion and behaviour in simple action sequences. The infants who had participated in music, but not those who had not, were surprised by music-face inconsistent displays and were able to interpret an agent's action as guided by her expressed emotion. The findings suggest a privileged role of musical experience in prompting infants to form emotional representations, which support their understanding of the association between affective states and action.

Infants’ sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding

“…Because music is integral to parent-infant interaction, we argue that infants can draw on the affective information coded in music to represent others’ intention. Siu and Cheung [ 26 ] trained 15-month-olds on the association between various emotions and their accompanying facial expressions and body movements over three months, either with or without engaging the infants with music during training. Their findings showed that musical engagement not only promoted the infants’ sensitivity to musical expressions but also facilitated their understanding of the link between emotion and behaviour in a non-musical context.…”

“…The third question is whether emotional representation in music and non-musical emotion-action understanding are naturally correlated, and if they are, at what age the relationship would become observable. We hypothesise the relationship because both abilities may be supported by the same underlying, more generalised capacity to represent others’ emotional states, which is fundamental to the infant’s early social development [ 26 ]. This generalised capacity is assumed to underpin non-musical facial-vocal expression, goal-directed action, as well as musical expression.…”

Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder

“…Consistent with this, musicians show stronger responses to emotional speech prosody than non-musicians in regions implicated in modality-independent inferences about others’ mental states, including the medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices 26 . Additionally, training studies indicate that musical activities enhance aspects of infants’ socio-emotional functioning beyond music/pitch processing, including the understanding of others’ actions based on vocal and visual affective cues 27 , and nonverbal communication and social interaction skills 28 .…”

The Arts as a Venue for Developmental Science: Realizing a Latent Opportunity

“…One study showed that when 4‐year‐olds make music in a group (compared with physically similar group activity without music), they then act more prosocially toward other members of that group (Kirschner & Tomasello, ). Similarly, when engaged in an emotion training program with or without music, 18‐month‐old infants who had engaged in the music program had better knowledge of emotional expression and the intention‐action link (i.e., theory of mind) than infants who had participated without music (Siu & Cheung, ).…”