The Effects of Tempo and Familiarity on Children’s Affective
Interpretation of Music
Jasmine Mote
Oberlin CollegeWhen and how does one learn to associate emotion with music? This study attempted to address this issue by examining whether preschool children use tempo as a cue in determining whether a song is happy or sad. Instrumental versions of children’s songs were played at different tempos to adults and children ages 3 to 5 years. Familiar and unfamiliar songs were used to examine whether familiarity affected children’s identification of emotion in music. The results indicated that adults, 4 year olds and 5 year olds rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow songs. However, 3 year olds failed to rate fast songs differently than slow songs at above-chance levels. Familiarity did not significantly affect children’s identification of happiness and sadness in music.
Keywords:affect, children, development, emotion, music, nursery songs, preschoolers, tempo
Psychological studies on young children have attempted to address the issue of when and how we learn to associate emotion with music. Some researchers conclude that children as young as 3 and 4 years of age are able to identify major emotions, such as happiness and sadness, from music (Dolgin & Adelson, 1990; Kastner & Crowder, 1990; Nawrot, 2003). However, other studies have indicated that 3 and 4 year olds may be completely unable to distinguish emotion from music in a manner similar to adults (Dalla Bella, Peretz, Rousseau, & Gosselin, 2001; Gregory, Wor-rall, & Sarge, 1996). Among authors of previously mentioned research as well as of studies that have examined older children, there is a general consensus that by the age of 6, children are able to identify emotions from music in a manner consistent with adult judgments (Giomo, 1993; Kratus, 1993; Terwogt & Van Grinsven, 1991). It remains unclear, however, whether children younger than this have the ability to perceive emotion in music in the same way that adults can.
Psychological research on adults has linked particular structural elements of music to particular affective qualities (for reviews, see Gabrielsson & Juslin, 2003; Gabrielsson & Lindstro¨m, 2001). By manipulating an element of music, researchers have attempted to identify the age at which children are able to perceive emotion in music based on its structural content. Tempo (or beats per minute) has been characterized as one of the most important structural determinants of the emotional expression of music (Gabrielsson &
Lindstro¨m, 2001). A faster tempo is strongly associated with happiness and joy, whereas a slower tempo is associated with sadness and gloom in adults (Gabrielsson & Juslin, 2003; Gagnon & Peretz, 2003; Hevner, 1937; Rigg, 1940; Scherer & Oshinsky, 1977; Webster & Weir, 2005). There are also some related find-ings with children regarding the association between tempo and emotion. Five year olds are able to identify emotion based on tempo, and children older than 5 are able to identify emotion based on both tempo and mode (Dalla Bella et al., 2001). Children tend to sing faster when told to sing to make someone feel happy, and tempo has been found to be the most effective predictor of whether a child is singing to make someone feel either happy or sad (Adachi & Trehub, 1998). It remains unresolved because of the dearth of past research whether children younger than the age of 5 are able to use tempo as a cue to identify emotion in music.
Another issue in the existing children’s literature is that the majority of studies have used music from the Western classical genre as stimuli (e.g., Cunningham & Sterling, 1988; Dalla Bella et al., 2001; Giomo, 1993; Kratus, 1993; Nawrot, 2003). These pieces may be unfamiliar and overly complex for younger chil-dren. Studies that have not used music from this genre have still used pieces that would be unfamiliar to preschool-aged children, including folk songs (Kastner & Crowder, 1990), commercial jingles (Doherty, Fitzsimons, Asenbauer, & Staunton, 1999), and unfamiliar nursery songs (Gregory et al., 1996). It has been sug-gested that using music that is simpler and more familiar to preschool-aged children may aid in producing more accurate re-sults for this age group (Dalla Bella et al., 2001).
The following study was designed to shed light on the question of how and when we learn to identify emotion in music by ascertaining whether children younger than 6 are able to interpret emotion in music in a manner similar to adults. Tempo was selected as the critical cue because of its importance in the adult literature as a determinant of the emotional content in music. Furthermore, the current study uses simple melodies written for children in an attempt to increase the sensitivity of the study. Both familiar and unfamiliar children’s songs were played at fast and Jasmine Mote is now at the Department of Psychology, Northeastern
University.
I thank all of the preschools and day care centers for their participation in the current study. I also wish to offer my sincere gratitude to William Friedman, Patricia deWinstanley, Joy Hanna, Jody Kerchner, Maria Quinn, and Christina James for their support and assistance in this research. This research was supported by the Jerome Davis Research Fund.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jasmine Mote, Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, 125 Nightin-gale Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail: jasmine.mote@gmail.com
slow tempos to examine whether familiarity with particular music affects children’s interpretations of its emotional quality. If chil-dren are able to accurately identify emotion from familiar and unfamiliar songs in a manner consistent with adults’ judgments, this would suggest that children are able to identify emotion based on the particular structural element of a song, tempo, rather than relying on preexisting emotional associations with specific songs.
Method
Sample
Children. Participants included 66 children 3 to 5 years of age (M⫽53.41 months,SD⫽8.61 months) from four separate preschools in Ohio. Five children were not included in the final sample because of their failure to understand the procedure (N⫽
1), their failure to complete the entire experiment (N ⫽ 3), or technical difficulties encountered in administering the auditory stimuli (N⫽1). Sixty-one children (24 females) were included in the final data analysis (M⫽53.75 months;SD⫽8.40 months). The children were from Preschool A, a public school (N⫽ 9); Preschool B, a private early childhood center (N⫽18); Preschool C, a Christian school (N⫽31); and Day Care Center A, a day care center in a retirement community (N⫽3). Children participated under the conditions of gaining written consent from their parents/ guardians and the child giving oral consent at the time of testing. Eighteen 3 year olds (38 – 46 months, M⫽ 43.11,SD ⫽ 2.22), twenty-two 4 year olds (48 –59 months,M⫽53.86,SD⫽3.67), and twenty-one 5 year olds (60 –70 months,M ⫽ 62.76,SD ⫽
2.47) were included in the final analysis.
Adults. Participants included 24 Oberlin College undergrad-uates (19 females) who were enrolled in an introductory psychol-ogy course. In an attempt to maintain homogeneity in musical expertise, the sample excluded participants who had taken music lessons or had studied an instrument extensively past junior high school.
Stimuli
Musical stimuli were chosen with the aid of a musical expert from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. The musical expert, a professor of music education, had extensive experience working with children in a musical setting and advised the researcher in choosing songs that would be either familiar or unfamiliar to American preschool-aged children. Furthermore, songs were cho-sen with the help of the musical expert in an attempt to maintain structural homogeneity across songs (e.g., choosing songs that were all in the major mode, with similar rhythm, melodic contour, length and number of phrases, etc.). The songs came from the Oxford Nursery Song Book (Buck, 1939) used in Gregory et al. (1996) andThe American Treasury of 1004 Folk Songs: A musical history in two volumes, Volume 1700 –1899(Hood & Hood, 1997). The familiar songs selected were “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Bingo,” “London Bridge is Falling Down,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Fre`re Jacques (Brother John),” and “Old MacDonald.” The unfamiliar songs selected were “Polly Put the Kettle On,” “London’s Burning,” “One Man Went to Mow,” “The Brisk Young Bachelor,” “Savez-Vous Planter les Choux,” and “D’ye ken John Peel.” Instrumental excerpts of the songs were performed
by a musician on a Yamaha Portable Grand DGX-305 keyboard. The stimuli were recorded using a Handy Recorder H4 by Zoom onto MP3 format. Both the familiar and unfamiliar stimuli were performed at 90 and 220 beats per minute (bpm) and recorded.1
The songs ranged from 7 to 35 s in length (M⫽14.92,SD⫽7.27). Fast songs (220 bpm) ranged from 7 to 16 s (M⫽ 9.42,SD ⫽
2.50), and slow songs (90 bpm) ranged from 11 to 35 s (M ⫽
20.42,SD⫽6.19). Familiar songs ranged from 9 to 35 s (M⫽
17.58,SD ⫽8.07), and unfamiliar songs ranged from 7 to 23 s (M ⫽ 12.25, SD ⫽ 5.46). The durations of the familiar and unfamiliar songs did not differ significantly from each other, t(24)⫽1.88,p⬎.05.
Rating Scale
Pictorial representations of faces from Dalla Bella et al. (2001) were chosen to represent the choices of happy and sad judgments (see Figure 1).
Procedure
Children were tested individually during regular preschool hours. Participants were tested either in a room alone with the experimenter or with a teacher passively present. The schematic “happy” and “sad” faces (each 4.25” by 5.5”) were presented on a table in front of each child, the placement of the faces counterbal-anced for each participant. After it was assured that the child could identify the emotions on the schematic faces correctly, the exper-imenter administered instructions for the task (calling it a “game”). The experimenter instructed each participant to listen to each stimulus in its entirety. When the stimulus was finished, the experimenter instructed the child to point to the face that “matched” the stimulus (e.g., “If a song sounds happy, point to the happy face”).
The stimuli were played on a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop using the iTunes 7.6.1.9 music player for all participants. The intensity (volume) of the songs was kept constant for all participants using the laptop’s volume control device. Four different playlists were made to include three fast familiar songs, three fast unfamiliar songs, three slow familiar songs, and three slow unfamiliar songs. One playlist was administered to one participant, and the subse-quent participant was administered the next playlist and so on. The songs were played in a random order using the iTunes “Shuffle” feature, which automatically randomizes the playing order of a playlist. The only manipulation made to the song order by the experimenter was to rerandomize the order if the first three songs were the same tempo. The experimenter did this to avoid the possibility that the child would fall into a pattern of answering each song with the same answer (happy or sad).
Adults were tested in groups. The first group (N⫽14) listened to one playlist, and the second group (N ⫽ 10) listened to a
1These tempos were chosen based on a pilot study conducted before the
different playlist. The playlists were the same playlists that were administered to the children and were chosen so that both the fast and slow versions of each song were rated by the adults. For example, if the first group heard the fast version of “Old MacDonald,” then the second group heard the slow version of that stimulus. Participants were given surveys with pictures of the schematic faces and were given similar instructions as the children (e.g., “If you think a song sounds sad, mark the column under the sad face for that song”).
Results
Responses to stimuli were coded using a dichotomous scale for both children and adults, with 0 representing a “sad” response and 1 representing a “happy” response. Each participant had a total of 12 scores (i.e., responses) recorded in this manner for the 12 stimuli that he or she listened to. Each participant listened to three familiar fast songs, three familiar slow songs, three unfamiliar fast songs, and three unfamiliar slow songs. Averaging across songs within a condition resulted in four additional scores for each participant (ranging from 0 –1):slow familiar,fast familiar,slow unfamiliar, and fast unfamiliar. For example, a child listens to three fast familiar songs and judges one as happy (1), another as happy (1), and one as sad (0). Thefast familiarscore for that child is the average of these three scores (0.67).
Adults
Adult ratings were subjected to a repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with tempo and familiarity as the within-subjects factors. The ANOVA revealed a significant tempo ⫻
familiarity interaction,F(1, 23)⫽5.66,p⫽.026,partial eta2
⫽
0.20. Adults rated fast songs (M⫽0.86,SD⫽0.13) significantly happier than slow songs (M⫽0.40,SD⫽0.26),F(1, 23)⫽60.43, p⬍.001,partial eta2
⫽0.72. Post hoc paired-samplesttests were computed and revealed that unfamiliar, fast songs (M ⫽ 0.81, SD⫽0.22) were rated as less happy than familiar, fast songs (M⫽
0.92,SD⫽0.15), but this effect was only marginally significant, t(23)⫽2.00,p⫽.057,d⫽0.41. No significant main effect was observed for familiarity, suggesting that there was no significant difference between the emotional ratings of unfamiliar (M⫽0.63, SD⫽0.19) and familiar songs (M⫽0.63,SD⫽0.19),F(1, 23)⫽
0.00,p⬎.05. All other comparisons were nonsignificant.
Children
Children’s ratings were also subjected to a repeated-measures ANOVA. Tempo and familiarity were the within-subjects factors, and age was the between-subjects factor. The ANOVA revealed a significant tempo⫻age effect,F(2, 58)⫽4.59,p⫽.014,partial eta2
⫽0.14 (see Table 1). Overall, children rated fast songs (M⫽
0.65,SD⫽0.21) as significantly happier than slow songs (M⫽
0.43,SD⫽0.24),F(1, 58)⫽24.21,p⬍.001,partial eta2
⫽0.29. Post hoc paired-samplesttests were computed for each age group. Five year olds rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow songs,t(20)⫽4.68,p⬍.001,d⫽1.02. Four year olds also rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow songs,t(21)⫽3.47, p⫽.002,d⫽0.74. However, 3 year olds showed no significant difference in their ratings of fast and slow songs,t(17)⫽0.46,p⬎
.05. No significant main effect was observed for familiarity, sug-gesting that there was no significant difference between the emo-tional ratings of unfamiliar (M⫽0.52,SD⫽0.18) and familiar songs (M⫽0.57,SD⫽0.19),F(1, 58)⫽2.07,p⬎.05. All other comparisons were nonsignificant.
Discussion
This study attempted to determine whether children under the age of 6 are able to identify emotion in music based on tempo in a manner similar to adults. The results revealed that both adults and children rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow songs. However, for children there was a significant interaction between tempo and age: whereas 4 and 5 year olds rated fast songs as significantly happier than slow ones, 3 year olds failed to rate fast songs significantly different in affective content than slow ones. This is the first study to show that children as young as 4 are able to use tempo as a cue in identifying emotion in music in the same manner as adults. These results confirm previous research that has suggested that children as young as 4 are able to use some of the same structural cues in music to identify emotion as adults (Dolgin & Adelson, 1990; Kastner & Crowder, 1990; Nawrot, 2003). However, these findings conflict with Dalla Bella et al.’s (2001) results that children under the age of 5 are unable to identify emotion in music based on tempo. This difference may be attributable to the difference in stimuli between the two studies. Dalla Bella et al. used classical music in their design, whereas the current study used simpler songs, an improvement that the authors themselves suggested. The results from the current study suggest that the use of simpler songs written for children may allow for more sensitive assessment of young children’s affective identifi-cations in music.
This was also the first study to systematically alter the famil-iarity of stimuli in its design to examine whether familfamil-iarity
Figure 1. Schematic faces for “happy” and “sad” from Dalla Bella et al. (2001). Reprinted with permission from “A developmental study of the affective value of tempo and mode in music,” by S. Dalla Bella, I. Peretz, L. Rousseau, and N. Gosselin, 2001,Cognition, 80, pp. B1–B10. Copyright 2001 by Elsevier.
Table 1
Children’s Ratings by Age Group and Tempo Condition
Fast tempo Slow tempo
Age (years) n M(SD) n M(SD)
3 18 0.56 (0.19) 18 0.52 (0.20)
4 22 0.69 (0.22) 22 0.43 (0.26)
affected children’s interpretations of emotion in music. Familiarity did not significantly affect children’s or adults’ emotional inter-pretations of the musical stimuli. Adults rated unfamiliar, fast songs as slightly less happy than familiar, fast songs, but this effect was only marginally significant. In this study, it appears that children were able to base their affective judgments of the stimuli on tempo alone, suggesting that tempo affects children’s interpre-tations of emotion in music more than familiarity. One reason why tempo may be particularly salient to children could be the rela-tionship between speed in human behavior (e.g., rate of speech) and the expression of emotion. Just as fast songs tend to be perceived as happy, a faster rate of speech is often exhibited when people are excited or overly joyful. In clinical terms, rapid speech is a symptom of mania. Furthermore, psychomotor retardation, including slowed speech and body movements, is a symptom of a major depressive episode (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Children may be generalizing this association between speed and emotion to their judgments of music.
It remains unclear why the ability to identify emotion in music based on tempo cues would develop between the ages of 3 and 4. Three year olds’ results could be attributed to their lack of com-petency in the task. Only 3 year olds had difficulty in identifying the emotions in the schematic faces before listening to the music. Also, compared with the other age groups tested, 3 year olds were easily distracted, and it was often difficult to hold their attentions for the 10 min required by the task. Future studies may wish to take advantage of more engaging tasks for this age group, such as using puppets to aid in focusing 3 year olds’ attention (e.g., Denham & Couchoud, 1990). The use of puppets has been proven to be an effective method in holding very young children’s attentions and may be more suitable than the schematic face task of the present study when testing 3 year olds.
Another limitation in the current study is that only two emotion choices were presented to participants (happy and sad). This was done to limit the cognitive load on very young children. However, past evidence suggests that when participants are given separate measures to report valence (pleasantness/unpleasantness) and arousal (high/low), fast and slow tempos are associated with dif-ferent arousal scores but not difdif-ferent valence scores (Husain, Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002; Ilie & Thompson, 2006). Be-cause sadness is an unpleasant, low-arousal emotion and happiness is a pleasant, high-arousal emotion, it is possible that children were rating the arousal of the music rather than the emotion category. Future studies may wish to use independent measures of valence and arousal to parse out whether children are identifying arousal and valence differently when listening to music. For example, the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) is a nonverbal pictorial scale that has been used to measure valence, arousal, and dominance on separate scales (Bradley & Lang, 1994; Lang, 1980). The SAM has been effectively administered to children as young as 3.5 years of age, and it, or a modified version of it, may be a useful tool in measuring children’s interpretation of arousal and valence in mu-sic (Greenbaum & Turner, 1990).
Directions for future research include continuing to use familiar and unfamiliar songs to shed light on the role of familiarity on one’s perception of emotion in music. The continued use of chil-dren’s songs and the manipulation of other structural elements of music (e.g., mode) are necessary to confirm the idea that such stimuli are able to produce more accurate results on young
chil-dren. Studies examining children’s affective interpretation of mu-sic should continue to diversify the types of mumu-sical stimuli used. Finally, more sensitive measures are necessary to maintain the attentions of very young children as well as clarify whether chil-dren are indeed identifying emotions (vs. only arousal levels) from music.
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Received February 28, 2010 Revision received October 25, 2010
