Can t Stop the Feeling: Age Differences in the Experimental Induction of Emotions through Music Clips

Abstract

Music contains cues such as tempo, pitch and key, which may induce basic emotions (Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 2016). In fact, music used in the laboratory has proved to induce emotional states, similar to real experienced emotions, in adults (Scherer, 2004). Although we know that this fact can have relevant clinical applications (i.e., music has positive effects in hospitalized children, Barrera, Rykov & Doyle, 2002), no experimental studies have evaluated (1) whether different basic emotional experiences can be induced in children and (2) whether emotional and cognitive evaluations might differ across age groups.

To address this gap, ninety 7-9-year-olds (M = 8.77; 53% girls), ninety-six 10-12-year-olds (M = 10.95; 49% girls), and eighty adults (M = 20.54; 80% women) listened in randomized order to two happiness-, anger-, fear-inducing and two neutral songs, previously used with adults to induce such emotional states (Ford & Tamir, 2012). Participants indicated how they felt (emotional judgment) after listening to each song and to what extent they thought the song matched with different emotion terms (cognitive judgment).

The happiness-, fear-inducing and the neutral music clips provoked the expected emotions across all age groups. The anger-inducing music clips only induced anger in adults but not in children, who reported happiness instead. Interestingly, for the happiness-, anger, and fear-inducing music clips adults did differ in their cognitive and emotional evaluations. Namely, they did attribute the right emotion to each song but reported lower emotion induction as compared to children. For the neutral music clips, this pattern was true for all the age groups.

These results highlight interesting differences in the cognitive and affective evaluations of music clips across age groups. However, further research is needed to investigate whether anger-induction might depend on different musical features (i.e., pitch, tempo, key).