Emotional self-regulation through music in 3-8-year-old children

The current study explored the role of music in children’s emotional self-regulation. Music is shown to be a common and effective way of self-regulating emotions in adolescence and adulthood. It is also widely known that parents use music to regulate the emotions of their babies, for instance in calming them down by lullabies. However, very little is known about how children themselves use music for emotional needs, and how the self-regulatory emotional engagement develops. A survey study was conducted with parents of 63 children including 37 boys and 26 girls, aged between 2.9 to 8.1 years. The parents answered questions about their child’s musical activities, preferences, and emotion-regulatory uses of music. Open-ended questions had a significant role due to the exploratory nature of the study, and the answers were analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Four emotion-regulatory uses of music were identified: music helped the children to calm down, to keep concentrated and interested, to express and enhance happiness and energy level, and to fantasize through mental imagery. The emotional use of music developed from parent-directed regulation to the child’s self-directed regulation through family examples, learning, and self-development. The study provided preliminary information about the main functions and characteristics of emotional self-regulation through music in childhood, strengthening our understanding of how the foundations for the music-related emotional self-regulation are built. I. BACKGROUND AND AIM The human ability to perceive emotion in music develops at a very early age. Already infants are able to interpret the emotional content of their caregivers’ auditory expression (Schubert & McPherson, 2006). They prefer emotional “motherese” over normal non-emotional adult speech (Trehub & Nakata, 2001), consonant musical intervals over dissonant intervals (at 2 months of age) (Trainor et. al., 2002), and happy expression over sad expression (at 5-7 months of age) (Nawrot, 2003). The abilities to recognize emotion in music and express emotion through music develop across childhood years. Already three-year-olds are able to distinguish happy and sad music (Kastner & Crowder, 1990), and 4-6-year olds are able to correctly identify happiness, sadness, anger and fear in music (Dolgin & Adelson, 1990; Cunningham & Sterling, 1988). However, children often confuse anger and fear in music (Robazza et al., 1994; Terwogt & Van Grinsven, 1991; Boone & Cunningham, 2001). Four-year-olds are able to express sadness and happiness by manipulating tempo, dynamics, and pitch (Adachi & Trehub, 1998), but the connotation between major mode happiness and minor mode sadness only becomes gradually learned by the age of 6-9 years (Dalla Bella et al., 2001; Gregory et al. 1996; Nieminen, 2007). The increasing complexity of emotional understanding is also reflected in the way children describe music. From age 3 to 8 children’s descriptions develop from simple (e.g. loud, fast), to more complex, including adjectives, metaphor, and character (e. g. liquid, funny, romantic) (Gardner, 1973; Sloboda, 1992). The ability to recognize emotion is essential also for the ability to regulate emotions. Emotional self-regulation can be defined as processes directed towards modification of the occurrence, duration and intensity of various emotions, and it may be targeted to the subjective experience, physiological responses, or behavioral expression of the emotion (e.g. Gross, 1998). As regards to music, parents’ use of music to regulate their child’s emotions is widely noted in the early childhood literature (Dissanayake, 1988; Trehub & Trainor, 1998). Mothers’ singing, for instance, is shown to be effective in helping a baby to stop crying, calm down, and focus attention (Tafuri, & Villa, 2002). Music helps to strengthen the emotional connection between the parent and the child, as it serves as a safe and joyful means for non-verbal emotional communication between them (e.g. Oldfield, 1993). Parents’ sensitive and consistent emotional responding and communication is essential for the development of the child’s own abilities for emotion recognition, emotion expression, and emotional self-regulation. For instance, maternal positive guidance, responsiveness, and sensitivity in the emotional communication are shown to predict children’s positive emotion regulation abilities (Conway & McDonough, 2006; Hahn et al., 2006). The use of music for emotional self-regulation is widely studied in adolescents (Behne, 1997; North et al., 2000; Roe, 1985; Saarikallio & Erkkila, 2007; Wells & Hakanen, 1991), and music is also used for emotional self-regulation in adulthood and old age (DeNora, 1999; Hays & Minichiello, 2005; Laukka, 2006). Emotional self-regulation through music includes maintenance and enhancement of positive emotional states, as well as discharging, diverting away from, and contemplating over negative emotional states. Emotional self-regulation also often includes elements of biographical work and regulation of energy levels (e.g. DeNora, 1999; Saarikallio & Erkkila, 2007). Children as young as 11, have been shown to be relatively skillful at regulating their emotions through music (Ashley & Durbin, 2006; Saarikallio, 2008). Yet, there has been no systematic exploration of how the self-regulatory use of music develops during childhood years. Little is known about how children themselves use music for emotional needs. There is a gap in understanding how parents’ use of music for regulating their children’s emotions, develops into the child’s self-directed regulation of emotions through music. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore the nature of music-related emotional self-regulation during early childhood. The purpose was to shed light on questions such as through what music, in what kind of situations, in relation to which emotions, for what kind of regulatory purposes, and with what kind of level of Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM 2009) Jyvaskyla, Finland Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg, Paivi-Sisko Eerola (Editors) URN:NBN:fi:jyu-2009411314 459 self-directedness does the emotional regulation through music occur in children.