Enhanced recognition of vocal emotions in individuals with naturally good musical abilities.

Abstract

Music training is widely assumed to enhance several nonmusical abilities, including speech perception, executive abilities, reading, and emotion recognition. This assumption is based primarily on cross-sectional comparisons between musicians and nonmusicians. It remains unclear, however, whether training itself is necessary to explain the musician advantages, or whether factors such as innate predispositions and informal musical experience could produce similar effects. Here, we sought to clarify this issue by examining the association between music and vocal emotion recognition. The sample (N = 169) comprised musically trained and untrained listeners who varied widely in their music perception abilities, as assessed through self-report and performance-based measures. The emotion recognition tasks required listeners to categorize emotions in nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) and in speech prosody. Music training was associated positively with emotion recognition across tasks, but the effect was small. We also found a positive association between music perception abilities and emotion recognition in the entire sample, even with music training held constant. In fact, untrained participants with good musical abilities were as good as highly trained musicians at recognizing vocal emotions. Moreover, the association of music training with emotion recognition was fully mediated by auditory and music perception skills. Thus, in the absence of formal music training, individuals who were 'naturally' musical showed musician-like performance at recognizing vocal emotions. These findings highlight an important role for predispositions and informal musical experience in associations between music and nonmusical domains.

Does Music Training Improve Emotion Recognition Abilities? A Critical Review

“…For instance, Lima and Castro (2011) compared forty musicians and forty untrained listeners, from a wide age range (18-60 years), in the recognition of seven prosodic emotions in sentences with emotionally neutral semantic content. Musicians showed improved recognition accuracy, and the effect was similar across the age range and emotions (for a replication, see Correia et al, 2020). Similar advantages have been found for emotion recognition in tone sequences mimicking spoken sentences (Thompson et al, 2004, Experiment 1), in pseudowords (Fuller et al, 2014), and for inferences of whether a vocal expression was produced during a depressive state or not (Nilsonne & Sundberg, 1985).…”

“…Similar advantages have been found for emotion recognition in tone sequences mimicking spoken sentences (Thompson et al, 2004, Experiment 1), in pseudowords (Fuller et al, 2014), and for inferences of whether a vocal expression was produced during a depressive state or not (Nilsonne & Sundberg, 1985). In four of the studies reporting an advantage of music training, however, group differences were restricted to a subgroup of participants (Parsons et al, 2014) or a subset of emotions (Thompson et al, 2004;Pinheiro et al, 2015;Correia et al, 2020).…”

“…Most cross-sectional studies explore how trained listeners recognize vocal emotions, using prosodic stimuli in the majority of cases (e.g., Correia et al, 2020;Farmer et al, 2020;Fuller et al, 2014;Lima & Castro, 2011;Park et al, 2015;Pinheiro et al, 2015), but also melodic analogues of emotional prosody (Thompson et al, 2004;Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008) and purely nonverbal vocalizations (Correia et al, 2020;Parsons et al, 2014). Only a few studies examined emotion recognition for other modalities, including faces (Correia et al, 2020;Farmer et al, 2020;Weijkamp & Sadakata, 2016) and audio-visual stimuli (Farmer et al, 2020;Weijkamp & Sadakata, 2016). The focus is typically on the recognition of specific emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness), evaluated via forced-choice tasks, in which participants select the emotion being expressed by each stimulus from a list of alternatives.…”

“…Therefore, there is evidence for enhanced vocal emotion recognition in musicians, but the advantage is not always apparent. One possibility is that the effect is small (e.g., Correia et al, 2020), and that relatively large samples are required for the association to emerge.…”

“…Only a few studies have accounted for cognitive abilities (Figure 1). Among the studies that measured cognitive abilities and documented musician advantages in emotion recognition, all found positive associations between music training and general cognitive abilities (Correia et al, 2020;Lima & Castro, 2011;Thompson et al, 2004). Thompson and colleagues (2004), however, showed that group differences in emotional prosody recognition could not the explained by cognitive performance, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices.…”