Children's Emotion Recognition in Music and Speech: A Study

1 Discussion Three Southern New Hampshire University MAT-133: Intro to Statistical Analysis Stacey Sivley July 8, 2021 2

The study of Children’s recognition of emotion in music and speech is based on whether children respond differently to music, speech, or facial expressions. In this study they asked 60 children from ages 6-11 years old to participate and 51 university students to judge the emotions of 10 musical, inflected speech, and affect burst clips. The emotions that were presented in this study were happy, proud, sad, anger, and fear. It was found that the easiest clips to recognize were sadness and then happiness. In this study it was discovered that unless children have had musical training outside of what they learn in classes that the younger the children are the harder it is for them to decipher between emotions when it comes to music. Although children have difficulty judging emotions from speech prosody, children as young as five years old are proficient at judging emotions from non-verbal vocalisations, or affect bursts ( Sauter et al., 2013 ). When presented with pieces of Western classical music, three- and four-year-old children were unable to label happiness and sadness based on tempo or mode, while five-year-old’s used only tempo to determine emotion, and six- to eight-year-olds, like adults, used both tempo and mode to determine emotion in a piece of music ( Dalla Bella, Peretz, Rousseau, & Gosselin, 2001 ). More recognition is found in affect bursts than in music and speech. The older the child is they compare more to adults in some aspects compared to others. 11-year old’s basically scored closely similar to the adults if not the same as them. Given these results, and our finding that recognition of emotion in music and speech develops in parallel, future research could more directly examine the relationship between social cohesion, and children’s understanding of emotions in music and speech. (Vidas, Dingle, Nelson, 2018). 3

“The acoustic cues used to convey emotion in speech are hypothesised to be similar to those used to convey emotion in music, as reported in a meta-analysis by Juslin and Laukka (2003) . For example, both angry speech and angry music are characterised by fast speech rate/tempo, high volume, and high pitch level ( Juslin & Laukka, 2003 ). Alternatively, sad speech and sad music may be characterised by slow speech rate/tempo, low volume, and low pitch level. In both music and prosody, tempo (speed of speech or music), pitch (the relative highness or lowness of a sound), and volume are the most common acoustic cues examined, due to their emotive capabilities ( Juslin & Laukka, 2003 ; Kamien, 2004 ). “. This research did prove that it is harder for children to understand vocal expressions compared to affect bursts or non-vocal expressions. It is also shown to be easier for any age to distinguish between happy and sad compared to the other feelings that were tested. However, it is said that the ability to distinguish emotions in music and speech increases with age. In this research, as I have stated before, they used different age groups and different sexes to get more accurate answers. However, throughout this article there were assumptions that younger children would score lower in the different sections of moods. They tested 5 different types of moods (happy, sad, angry, proud, and scared) to each area of music, speech, and affect bursts. According to the table I have inserted the assumptions were correct. 4

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As the ages got older the percentage got higher. As you can also see in the table that 6-7 and 8-9- year olds scored similarly than the 8-9 and 10-11 year olds I do believe that the conclusions from the research conducted are accurate. Children have a harder time determining feelings through vocal expressions, but as they age it comes more naturally to understand. I think the age groups that they used were divided perfectly as well because they can relate to each other easier. It did show in the research that people with musical history do have an easier time determining the feelings in music and speech, which makes sense. Something that surprised me in this study is that 10–11-year old’s did not score much lower than adults in each of the categories. Something that I draw from this study is that sometimes children do understand more and better than you may think that they do. Music is in every culture and all around the world and seeing that people can comprehend the emotions in the music is important to know. I believe that this is a well-designed research article. It has so much information based on the research that has been conducted. The fact that they divided the age groups the way that they did I believe that it was conducted much better than just doing kids under 18 and then a group of 5

adults over the age of 18. Putting fourth the effort to use different emotions and testing 10 different stimuli in each category makes the research a more believable outcome. Something I believe that could possibly benefit this research is possibly adding more stimuli into each category especially for the younger children to give them more of an opportunity to maybe understand what they are listening for. Something else I think would be beneficial would be to test different genres of music with each category. With doing this I believe that it would give opportunity for better outcomes in recognizing emotions in music. 6

References 1. Dalla Bella, S., Peretz, I., Rousseau, L., Gosselin, N. ( 2001 ). A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music . Cognition, 80(3), 1 – 10 . doi:10.1016/S0010- 0277(00)00136-0 2. Sauter, D. A., Panattoni, C., Happé, F. ( 2013 ). Children’s recognition of emotions from vocal cues . British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31(1), 97 – 113 . doi:10.1111/j.2044- 835X.2012.02081.x 3. Vidas D, Dingle GA, Nelson NL. Children’s recognition of emotion in music and speech. Music & Science. January 2018. doi:10.1177/2059204318762650 4. https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/na101/home/literatum/publisher/sage/ journals/content/mnsa/2018/mnsa_1/2059204318762650/20180309/images/large/ 10.1177_2059204318762650-table4.jpeg table 4 5. Juslin, P. N., Laukka, P. ( 2003 ). Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: Different channels, same code? Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 770 – 814 . doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.770

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