Their findings showed that musical engagement not only promoted the infants’ sensitivity to musical expressions but also facilitated their understanding of the link between emotion and behaviour in a non-musical context. Siu and Cheung trained 15-month-olds on the association between various emotions and their accompanying facial expressions and body movements over three months, either with or without engaging the infants with music during training. īecause music is integral to parent-infant interaction, we argue that infants can draw on the affective information coded in music to represent others’ intention. Therefore, caregivers typically capitalise on musical exchanges to communicate inner thoughts and feelings to their preverbal infants. Four-month-olds who listened to consonant music also vocalised more and fretted less than those listening to dissonant music. The intended messages were well received by the 6-month-olds, who directed their attention inward when the song was sung as a lullaby but outward to the external environment when it was sung in a more playful style. For instance, Rock, Trainor, and Addison showed that mothers considered the goal of communication (to arouse or soothe the infants) and rendered the same song in different performance styles accordingly. This explains the ubiquity of infant-directed singing and speech in parent-infant bonding because the melodies effectively engage preverbal infants in emotion and intention sharing. Basic emotions are assumed to be readily represented in music, which is made possible by manipulating basic acoustic (e.g., pitch, tempo, rhythm, loudness, timbre) and musical-system-specific cues (e.g., mode). Yet another cue to mind states possibly used by infants is music, which is conventionally regarded as a language of emotion conveying affective information in a unique way. Prior work has revealed several types of information that infants use to make such inferences, such as an agent’s prior choice, eye gaze, emotional displays, and utterances. Mental states are internal, private, and unobservable we can but only infer them from overt behaviour. Given that mindreading is essential to navigating the social world, one intriguing issue is how we may get access to others’ mind.
#Sad songs about children growing up update
Hence we constantly update others’ emotions and beliefs so that we can respond tactfully for maintaining positivity within groups. We can easily imagine how futile, or even embarrassing, an interaction could go if we fail to keep track of others’ mental states. The early development of mental state attribution suggests its fundamental role in social interaction. Infant research using spontaneous-response tasks has established that such a mentalising ability emerges much earlier than we have thought (see for a recent comprehensive review). We thus routinely represent others’ inner thoughts and feelings so as to interpret and predict their action.
The findings suggest that sensitivity to musical emotion and emotion-action understanding may be supported by a generalised common capacity to represent emotion from social cues, which lays a foundation for later social-communicative development.Īs adults we see one another as mentalistic agents whose behaviour is driven by intention, emotion, and belief. These two abilities however did not correlate with family income, parental estimation of language and communicative skills, and quality of parent-child interaction. Interestingly, for the 20-month-olds, such emotion-action understanding correlated with sensitivity to musical expressions measured in the first task. In a separate non-music task, only the 20-month-olds were able to use an actress’s affective facial displays to predict her subsequent action. The 20-month-olds, but not the 12-month-olds, were surprised by emotional incongruence between musical and facial expressions, suggesting their sensitivity to musical emotion. Twelve- and 20-month-olds were presented with emotionally concordant and discordant music-face displays on alternate trials. Do they interpret these cues in emotional terms to represent others’ affective states? The present study examined infants’ development of emotional understanding of music with a violation-of-expectation paradigm. Emerging evidence has indicated infants’ early sensitivity to acoustic cues in music.
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