Universality, domain-specificity and development of psychological responses to music

Abstract

Humans can find music happy, sad, fearful, or spiritual. They can be soothed by it or urged to dance. Whether these psychological responses reflect cognitive adaptations that evolved expressly for responding to music is an ongoing topic of study. In this Review, we examine three features of music-related psychological responses that help to elucidate whether the underlying cognitive systems are specialized adaptations: universality, domain-specificity, and early expression. Focusing on emotional and behavioural responses, we find evidence that the relevant psychological mechanisms are universal and arise early in development. However, the existing evidence cannot establish that these mechanisms are domain-specific. To the contrary, many findings suggest that universal psychological responses to music reflect more general properties of emotion, auditory perception, and other human cognitive capacities that evolved for non-musical purposes. Cultural evolution, driven by the tinkering of musical performers, evidently crafts music to compellingly appeal to shared psychological mechanisms, resulting in both universal patterns (such as form-function associations) and culturally idiosyncratic styles.

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report

“…The features that we identified as differentiating music and speech along a musi-linguistic continuumparticularly pitch height, temporal rate, and pitch stability-may represent promising candidates for future analyses of the (co)evolution of biological capacities for music and language (9,11,83). Meanwhile, the features we identified as shared between speech and song-particularly timbral brightness and pitch interval sizerepresent promising candidates for understanding domain-general constraints on vocalization that may shape the cultural evolution of music and language (7,28,90,91). Together, these cross-cultural similarities and differences may help shed light on the cultural and biological evolution of two systems that make us human: music and language.…”

Beyond Newton: Why assumptions of universality are critical to cognitive science, and how to finally move past them.

“…Among other patterns, research should attend to which cognitive features lead to local success, respect, and attention from others, thereby influencing transmission to subsequent generations. Promising lines of research are exploring variation in EOAs and their articulation with cognitive features in the context of language learning (Blasi et al, 2022), visual experience (Deręgowski, 2017;Segall et al, 1963), family organization (Enke, 2019;Schulz et al, 2019), norms (House et al, 2020), economic demands (Talhelm et al, 2014), literacy (Dehaene, 2010), teaching (Kline, 2015), and music (Singh & Mehr, 2023). Such enterprises should integrate experimental tools from the cognitive sciences with both qualitative and quantitative anthropological approaches, which include observational and ethnographic methods (e.g., Cole et al, 1971;Greenfield et al, 2003;Lancy et al, 2010;Lave, 1977;Rogoff, 2003).…”

Love songs and serenades: a theoretical review of music and romantic relationships

“…Musicality consists of many component abilities that are unlikely to have evolved for a unified purpose ( Fitch, 2015 ). Many of the emotional effects of music seem to engage domain-general processes for emotion regulation, particularly seen in the use of lullabies to calm infants or dance music to excite and coordinate groups ( Singh and Mehr, 2023 ). These emotion systems likely did not evolve specifically for music or love, but are exploited by them.…”