The development of children's interpretation of emotion in music

The relationship between music and emotion is complex, and has defied explanation for a great many years. The present study addressed one particular aspect of this issue: to what extent can young children interpret the emotions expressed in short musical excerpts drawn from larger works, and how do their interpretations differ from those of adults and change as they mature? Following an appraisal of current theoretical approaches and empirical research, a structural model of emotions incorporating the ideas of fuzzy, prototypically organised emotion concepts based on underlying dimensions of degree of pleasure and arousal or activation (Bullock & Russell, 1984, 1986; Russell, 1989) was used to reveal and interpret patterns and developmental trends in children's understanding of emotion in music. 5-year-old, 7-yearold and 9-year-old children and adults (n = 30 in each age group) participated in the main study. They were asked to link 18 musical excerpts to an emotion word/facial expression pair selected from the following alternatives: calm, happy, excited, scared, angry/cross and sad. These were presented to the subjects in a set of three tasks utilising different combinations of musical excerpts and emotion words.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

1996

Author dc:creator

• Wild, Lauren

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Oxtoby, Richard

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13860

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/13860