Five-year-old children identify emotions in music along valence and intensity dimensions

Abstract

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.