3-221 - The social and emotional significance of early shared musical experiences

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Shared musical experiences have long been known to be powerful means of eliciting emotional and social effects by synchronizing individuals’ movements and moods, and by creating a common ground of communication for people. Accumulating evidence also shows that these effects emerge remarkably early in life. In this symposium, three papers examine the social and emotional ramifications of shared musical experiences in infancy and childhood in three different social contexts.
Paper 1 examines the effects of parents’ multimodal speech and singing on the arousal levels of Canadian infants and their parents, and suggests that compared to speech, singing more effectively modulates infant arousal and distress, as well as having positive effects on parent arousal. Paper 2 examines possible mechanisms underlying the social effects of synchrony in North-American children, and suggests that a fundamental movement perception mechanism might be underlying the effect of synchrony on collaboration. Paper 3 examines Turkish children’s inferences of shared preference for and shared knowledge of music based on individuals’ social group membership, and suggests that sensitivity to the exclusive link between song knowledge and social group membership emerges early and might potentially guide children’s social preferences.
These papers shed new light on different mechanisms by which music elicits social and emotional effects early in life, and suggest that music is not only an important element in early caregiver-infant interactions, but its social effects extend to broader contexts in different cultures. Further investigating these effects will provide insight into different functions of music, particularly on its social significance.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Gaye Soley, Bogazici University

Discussant

• Laurel Trainor, McMaster University

Individual Presentations

• Parents’ songs as regulators of parent and infant emotions - Presenting Author: Laura Cirelli, University of Toronto Scarborough; Non-Presenting Author: Sandra Trehub, University of Toronto Mississauga

• Music and social interaction in the developing child - Presenting Author: Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, University of Haifa; Non-Presenting Author: Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington

• Children’s attributions of shared musical experiences on the basis of group membership - Presenting Author: Gaye Soley, Bogazici University