Preschoolers’ attribution of affect to music: A comparison between vocal and instrumental performance

Franco, Fabia; Chew, Marcia; Swaine, Joel S.

doi:10.1177/0305735616652954

Cited by 16 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 104 publications

(144 reference statements)

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“…This process of development is not clearly paralleled in music. While some studies have found evidence for discrimination of valence expressed by music in children as young as 3 years, most studies have found that the ability to discriminate happy from sad musical excerpts above chance starts to emerge at some point around 4 or 5 years of age ( Dolgin and Adelson, 1990 ; Adachi and Trehub, 1998 ; Mote, 2011 ; Stachó et al, 2013 ; Franco et al, 2016 ; but see Cunningham and Sterling, 1988 ; and Hunter et al, 2011 , for two studies that found this ability only in later ages). Notably, the ability emerges around the same age when they develop the ability to entrain to musical rhythms, suggesting that tempo variations play a central role in the ability to distinguish these two expressions both in speech and music ( Dalla Bella et al, 2001 ).…”

Section: Does Music Express Basic Emotions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, children’s ability to discriminate happy, sad, angry, and fearful expressions in music starts to appear around 6 to 8 years of age ( Kastner Pinchot and Crowder, 1990 ; Kratus, 1993 ; Gerardi and Gerken, 1995 ; Dalla Bella et al, 2001 ; Nawrot, 2003 ), and their ability only reaches adult-like performance in emotion discrimination tasks of music much later: around age 11 ( Hunter et al, 2011 ). The disagreements on the exact age where these abilities emerge may be attributed to differences in stimuli, procedure, and response formats used in each study (see Franco et al, 2016 for a review of these methods). However, beyond this variety, a developmental milestone that happens between 6 and 8 years of age explains the gradual development of discriminating several emotions expressed by music: the acquisition of sensitivity to mode, a musical cue associated with the expression of negative emotions in Western music ( Gregory et al, 1996 ).…”

Section: Does Music Express Basic Emotions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions – A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music

Cespedes-Guevara

Eerola

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.

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Section: Does Music Express Basic Emotions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Does Music Express Basic Emotions?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions – A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music

Cespedes-Guevara

Eerola

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…Basically, teachers need to be skilled to analyse the content of lessons that they want to convey and compose the lyrics according to the topic, the environment, or the ability of the child. Usually, children are quiet because he/she wants to interact with others in the way of communication he/she knows; the rhythmic method is an approach that could stimulate the mind and create multilateral interactions among children if they learn in group (Franco et al, 2017).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Learning through rhythmic techniques is a friendly and interesting way of attracting children (Franco, Chew, & Swaine, 2017). Indeed, children are a group of people who love singing and moving (Shenfield, Trehub, & Nakata, 2011).…”

Section: Application Of Rhythmic Techniques In Teaching Maintaining Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhythmic Technique in Preliteracy of English Language Learning in Increasing Pre-Schoolers Vocabulary

Bahri¹,

Yunus²

2021

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English Language adopted the "rhythmic technique" to cultivate and enhance mastery of the second language among preschool children. This rhythmic technique such as jazz chant, nursery rhyme, singing and dancing could broaden the domain of development in the learning and facilitating, or teaching and learning process. In addition, pre-literacy in English Language consisted of four main components relating to children's sensory and auditory skills which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills, integrated in this technique. Thirty preschoolers participated in this study who underwent several tests on preliteracy skills after rhythmic techniques were introduced to them. This paper discusses the procedures of intervention method and the scores obtained by the children through five bases or questions (from Q1 to Q5). The results or scores recorded by teachers/researchers on children (K21-K30) show that on average children have improved their skills. These findings are parallel to the previous observations that children tend to master the new vocabulary when emphasis was given to the phrase during rhythmic techniques on induction sets, developments and even plenary. Furthermore, it was hoped that this technique would be a tool for teachers in improving existing teaching processes; for researchers to further enhance the techniques. This study was however limited to the beginning of the implementation and would need further in-depth studies in the future to ensure the optimal growth of English vocabulary mastery in preschools.

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“…Overall, it appears that by 5 or 6 years old, children tend to agree with adults about basic emotions expressed in orchestral music, including happiness , sadness , anger , and fear , although the latter two are often confused (Cunningham & Sterling, 1988; Giomo, 1993; Kratus, 1993; Terwogt & van Grinsven, 1991; Vidas, Dingle, & Nelson, 2018). Other studies have reported successful recognition of happiness , sadness , and anger by children as young as 3 or 4 years old (Franco, Chew, & Swaine, 2016; Gentile, 1998) , and several studies found that infants as young as 5 months old could discriminate between excerpts that had been selected previously by adults and pre‐schoolers as representative of happy and sad (Flom, Gentile, & Pick, 2008; Flom & Pick, 2012). However, from these studies, it is impossible to know which expressive cues pre‐schoolers used in their judgments, and whether infant discrimination was based on differences in perceived affect per se or simply on differences in certain salient acoustic cues (for example, tempo differences between the happy and sad excerpts).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for early arousal‐based differentiation of emotions in children’s musical production

Kragness

Eitel

Baksh

et al. 2020

Developmental Science

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In adulthood, both music listeners and performers identify music-related emotions as among the primary motivations for engaging with music (Juslin & Laukka, 2004; Lindström, Juslin, Bresin, & Williamon, 2003). Indeed, this aspect of music has been proposed as one possible explanation for the observation that music is found across human cultures (e.g. Trainor, 2015). Thus, the association between music and emotion appears to be present in early infancy and persists throughout the lifetime. The ability to produce and recognize emotional signals is vital for successful social interactions in general. Gestures, facial expressions, language, and music can all contribute to the communication of emotions between humans. Though much of the emotional intent in spoken language is derived from the content of a sentence, emotional intent is also conveyed through the speaker's use of expressive

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Preschoolers’ attribution of affect to music: A comparison between vocal and instrumental performance

Cited by 16 publications

References 104 publications

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions – A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions – A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music

Rhythmic Technique in Preliteracy of English Language Learning in Increasing Pre-Schoolers Vocabulary

Evidence for early arousal‐based differentiation of emotions in children’s musical production

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