Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.

Emerging evidence has indicated infants' early sensitivity to acoustic cues in music. 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-expectat...

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Main Authors: Tik-Sze Carrey Siu, Him Cheung
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017-01-01
Series:PLoS ONE
Online Access:http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5289547?pdf=render
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spelling doaj-741af5f8c9344359b544088d13d71d672020-11-24T21:41:38ZengPublic Library of Science (PLoS)PLoS ONE1932-62032017-01-01122e017102310.1371/journal.pone.0171023Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.Tik-Sze Carrey SiuHim CheungEmerging evidence has indicated infants' early sensitivity to acoustic cues in music. 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. Twelve- and 20-month-olds were presented with emotionally concordant and discordant music-face displays on alternate trials. 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. 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. Interestingly, for the 20-month-olds, such emotion-action understanding correlated with sensitivity to musical expressions measured in the first task. These two abilities however did not correlate with family income, parental estimation of language and communicative skills, and quality of parent-child interaction. 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.http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5289547?pdf=render
collection DOAJ
language English
format Article
sources DOAJ
author Tik-Sze Carrey Siu
Him Cheung
spellingShingle Tik-Sze Carrey Siu
Him Cheung
Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
PLoS ONE
author_facet Tik-Sze Carrey Siu
Him Cheung
author_sort Tik-Sze Carrey Siu
title Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
title_short Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
title_full Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
title_fullStr Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
title_full_unstemmed Infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
title_sort infants' sensitivity to emotion in music and emotion-action understanding.
publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
series PLoS ONE
issn 1932-6203
publishDate 2017-01-01
description Emerging evidence has indicated infants' early sensitivity to acoustic cues in music. 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. Twelve- and 20-month-olds were presented with emotionally concordant and discordant music-face displays on alternate trials. 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. 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. Interestingly, for the 20-month-olds, such emotion-action understanding correlated with sensitivity to musical expressions measured in the first task. These two abilities however did not correlate with family income, parental estimation of language and communicative skills, and quality of parent-child interaction. 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.
url http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5289547?pdf=render
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