Name:Anne Cabildo

School/Affiliation:University of Toronto-Mississauga

Co-Authors:Luis de la Viña, Samuel Ronfard

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Music can serve as a powerful tool for emotion regulation throughout life. Previous research suggests that by age 5, Western children can identify basic emotions in music using cues such as tempo (fast vs. slow) and mode (major vs. minor) (Adachi & Trehub, 1998; Dalla Bella et al., 2001; Mote, 2011). However, it remains unclear how children use these musical cues to attribute emotional qualities to music. We test the hypothesis that children use tempo to infer arousal and mode to infer affect and combine these two aspects of emotional experience to classify music as calm, happy, sad, or angry. We further hypothesize that inferences about arousal and affect feed into children’s reasoning about how listening to music impacts one’s ability to perform physical and cognitive tasks. We hypothesize that children will predict that music that generates higher arousal will help physical performance while hindering cognitive performance and that positive affect will help performance relative to negative affect. Across a series of studies, 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults will listen to novel 20-second instrumental pieces composed to evoke four different emotions (happy, sad, angry, calm) using variations in tempo and mode. In Study 1, participants will view vignettes of a character listening to musical clips and rate the character's emotional valence (positive or negative) and arousal (level of energy). In Studies 2 and 3, participants will listen to the same musical clips and predict the character's performance on physical and cognitive tasks. By investigating the relationship between musical elements, emotion perception, and cognition, this study aims to provide insights into how music can be used to optimize learning and performance.