Understanding how young children recognize emotions in music

Music is a powerful tool for conveying mood, whether heard via a live performance or movie soundtrack, making it an effective medium for understanding how people identify and respond to emotions. Studies have found that children ages 5 to 11 show increasing accuracy in recognizing specific emotions in music.

However, research on emotion recognition in music among people with traits associated with “callous-unemotional” behavior—such as the absence of empathy, guilt, or open expression of feelings—is lacking. This matters because children higher in these traits are at higher risk for aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathological behaviors.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology in Penn’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.

“We show that children are good at matching emotion faces to the ‘correct’ emotion music, even at age 3,” says associate professor Rebecca Waller, co-senior author with former MindCORE postdoctoral fellow Rista C. Plate, “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.”

This is the first study examining whether children with higher callous-unemotional traits have difficulty recognizing music, Waller says. 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, says one of the most interesting findings is differences in emotion recognition from music compared to facial expressions.

Waller notes 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 says 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. She sees music as an alternate port of entry for children who struggle with understanding people’s emotions through facial expressions or other visual cues.

This study was conducted in a community sample of children with low overall levels of callous-unemotional traits, and the authors note that a future direction of research is replicating their work among children referred from a clinic that sees children higher in callous-unemotional traits. Waller says another interesting follow-up question is what factors—such as genetics or experiences—explain differences in children’s ability to identify emotions in music.

“We’re excited to continue to use music as a paradigm both to understand underlying mechanisms and as a treatment target,” she says. “Music can be highly evocative, which may be of particular benefit for this subgroup of children.”

Rebecca Waller is an associate professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences and director of the EDEN Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yael Paz is a postdoctoral fellow in the EDEN Lab.

The other co-authors are Sydney Sun, Michaela Flum, Yuheiry Rodriguez, Erin Brown, and Rista C. Plate of the Department of Psychology in Penn Arts & Sciences.

This paper was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01 MH125904), a MindCORE Postdoctoral Fellowship at Penn, Israel Science Foundation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University Scholars Program in Penn’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowship.