jurnal American Psychological Associatio apa
Emotion
2011, Vol. 11, No. 3, 618 – 622
© 2011 American Psychological Association
1528-3542/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0022573
The Effects of Tempo and Familiarity on Children’s Affective
Interpretation of Music
Jasmine Mote
Oberlin College
When 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, Worrall, & 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 findings 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 children. 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 suggested that using music that is simpler and more familiar to
preschool-aged children may aid in producing more accurate results 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 Nightingale Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail:
jasmine.mote@gmail.com
618
EFFECTS OF TEMPO AND FAMILIARITY
slow tempos to examine whether familiarity with particular music
affects children’s interpretations of its emotional quality. If children 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 undergraduates (19 females) who were enrolled in an introductory psychology 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 chosen 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) and The 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
619
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 counterbalanced for each participant. After it was assured that the child could
identify the emotions on the schematic faces correctly, the experimenter 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 subsequent 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
1
These tempos were chosen based on a pilot study conducted before the
full experiment. Adults (N ⫽ 46) listened to the familiar songs used in the
full experiment at various tempos and rated how subjectively faster or
slower each version of each song was compared with the version of the
song that they were familiar with. Ninety bpm and 220 bpm were chosen
as the slow and fast tempo, respectively, on the basis of the results from the
pilot study.
MOTE
620
Children
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.
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). The fast familiar score 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 withinsubjects 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-samples t tests 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’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-samples t tests 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, suggesting that there was no significant difference between the emotional 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 identifications in music.
This was also the first study to systematically alter the familiarity of stimuli in its design to examine whether familiarity
Table 1
Children’s Ratings by Age Group and Tempo Condition
Fast tempo
Slow tempo
Age (years)
n
M (SD)
n
M (SD)
3
4
5
18
22
21
0.56 (0.19)
0.69 (0.22)
0.71 (0.20)
18
22
21
0.52 (0.20)
0.43 (0.26)
0.33 (0.25)
EFFECTS OF TEMPO AND FAMILIARITY
affected children’s interpretations of emotion in music. Familiarity
did not significantly affect children’s or adults’ emotional interpretations 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 interpretations of emotion in music more than familiarity. One reason why
tempo may be particularly salient to children could be the relationship 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 competency 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 different arousal scores but not different valence scores (Husain,
Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002; Ilie & Thompson, 2006). Because 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 music (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 children’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-
621
dren. Studies examining children’s affective interpretation of music should continue to diversify the types of musical stimuli used.
Finally, more sensitive measures are necessary to maintain the
attentions of very young children as well as clarify whether children are indeed identifying emotions (vs. only arousal levels) from
music.
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Received February 28, 2010
Revision received October 25, 2010
Accepted December 8, 2010 䡲
2011, Vol. 11, No. 3, 618 – 622
© 2011 American Psychological Association
1528-3542/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0022573
The Effects of Tempo and Familiarity on Children’s Affective
Interpretation of Music
Jasmine Mote
Oberlin College
When 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, Worrall, & 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 findings 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 children. 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 suggested that using music that is simpler and more familiar to
preschool-aged children may aid in producing more accurate results 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 Nightingale Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115. E-mail:
jasmine.mote@gmail.com
618
EFFECTS OF TEMPO AND FAMILIARITY
slow tempos to examine whether familiarity with particular music
affects children’s interpretations of its emotional quality. If children 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 undergraduates (19 females) who were enrolled in an introductory psychology 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 chosen 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) and The 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
619
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 counterbalanced for each participant. After it was assured that the child could
identify the emotions on the schematic faces correctly, the experimenter 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 subsequent 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
1
These tempos were chosen based on a pilot study conducted before the
full experiment. Adults (N ⫽ 46) listened to the familiar songs used in the
full experiment at various tempos and rated how subjectively faster or
slower each version of each song was compared with the version of the
song that they were familiar with. Ninety bpm and 220 bpm were chosen
as the slow and fast tempo, respectively, on the basis of the results from the
pilot study.
MOTE
620
Children
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.
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). The fast familiar score 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 withinsubjects 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-samples t tests 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’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-samples t tests 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, suggesting that there was no significant difference between the emotional 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 identifications in music.
This was also the first study to systematically alter the familiarity of stimuli in its design to examine whether familiarity
Table 1
Children’s Ratings by Age Group and Tempo Condition
Fast tempo
Slow tempo
Age (years)
n
M (SD)
n
M (SD)
3
4
5
18
22
21
0.56 (0.19)
0.69 (0.22)
0.71 (0.20)
18
22
21
0.52 (0.20)
0.43 (0.26)
0.33 (0.25)
EFFECTS OF TEMPO AND FAMILIARITY
affected children’s interpretations of emotion in music. Familiarity
did not significantly affect children’s or adults’ emotional interpretations 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 interpretations of emotion in music more than familiarity. One reason why
tempo may be particularly salient to children could be the relationship 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 competency 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 different arousal scores but not different valence scores (Husain,
Thompson, & Schellenberg, 2002; Ilie & Thompson, 2006). Because 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 music (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 children’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-
621
dren. Studies examining children’s affective interpretation of music should continue to diversify the types of musical stimuli used.
Finally, more sensitive measures are necessary to maintain the
attentions of very young children as well as clarify whether children are indeed identifying emotions (vs. only arousal levels) from
music.
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Received February 28, 2010
Revision received October 25, 2010
Accepted December 8, 2010 䡲