Music Helps Children Recognize Specific Emotions at Early Age

Studies have found that children ages 5 to 11 show increasing accuracy in recognizing specific emotions in music.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences have studied how well 144 Philadelphia-area children ages 3 to 5 recognized happiness, sadness, calmness, or fear in 5-second music clips.

They find that children can identify emotions with a level of accuracy better than a random guess, with performance improving with age.

In addition, they find that children whose parents score them higher in callous-unemotional traits show poorer recognition of emotion in music overall but did not have a more difficult time recognizing fearful music. Their findings are published in Child Development magazine.

“We show that children are good at matching emotion faces to the ‘correct’ emotion music, even at age 3 which emphasizes how important music can be, particularly in emotion socialization and social skills teaching and for children who may still be learning ways to express their emotions verbally,” said associate professor Rebecca Waller and co-senior author of the findings.

This is the first study examining whether children with higher callous-unemotional traits have difficulty recognizing music, Waller said.

Yael Paz, a postdoctoral fellow in Waller’s EDEN Lab and co-first author with Syndey Sun, a Penn undergraduate at the time of this research, said one of the most interesting findings is differences in emotion recognition from music compared to facial expressions.

Waller noted that previous work from her lab and others shows that children with higher callous-unemotional traits have more difficulty recognizing distress from facial expressions.

The authors therefore hypothesized that children with higher callous-unemotional traits would have a harder time recognizing fearful music.

Paz said researchers were surprised to see that children higher in these traits were just as good at recognizing fear, suggesting that music may be uniquely well-suited for emotion recognition.

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