Music can help children understand emotions, report shows

A baby reacts as they listen to music.

Music has long been known as a powerful language of emotion, capable of expressing feelings that words often cannot. Now, research has revealed that music might be especially important in helping young children understand and recognise emotions.

Using a specially adapted task, researchers played five-second music clips expressing four distinct emotions: happiness, sadness, calmness and fear. Children then matched each clip to one of four faces depicting these emotions.

The results indicated that children’s overall accuracy was high, with greater success in identifying high-arousal emotions like happiness and fear than low-arousal ones such as sadness and calmness.

The study, "Hearing a Feeling: Music Emotion Recognition and Callous-Unemotional Traits in Early Childhood" published in Child Development, examined how children, between 3 and 5 years old, recognise emotions conveyed through music.

The findings show that even at this young age, children can identify emotional indicators in brief instrumental music clips, particularly those that convey strong feelings of happiness or fear.

The research report confirms that music goes beyond language and cultural barriers to evoke embodied emotional experiences in listeners. Unlike facial expressions or verbal language, which children must learn to interpret and label, music directly communicates emotions through its rhythm, tempo and key, creating intuitive emotional identity.

The study also found that this ability develops quickly between ages 3 and 5, with 5-year-olds demonstrating better accuracy than 3-year-olds. Interestingly, the composers’ choice of musical key influenced recognition. Clips in a major key, often associated with happy emotions, were more accurately recognised by children. This suggests that even at an early age, children are sensitive to unclear technical aspects of music that signal emotions.

Emotion recognition is vital for young children’s social competence, influencing how they relate to others, regulate their own feelings and navigate social environments.

While much research has focused on children's ability to decode facial expressions or verbal emotional cues, this study highlights music as an understudied but potentially rich avenue for understanding and supporting emotional development.

Because music conveys emotion in an embodied and often universal way, it offers a unique tool for assessing early emotional capacities, particularly in young children who might not yet possess the vocabulary or social experience to describe feelings through words or faces.

The study’s findings have profound implications for understanding children who exhibit callous-unemotional (CU) traits characterised by low empathy, limited guilt and reduced emotional sensitivity, which put them at higher risk for behavioural and social difficulties.

According to the report, children with higher CU traits struggle more to accurately recognise emotions in music, especially positively emotional music like happiness and calmness. Importantly, these children had trouble even differentiating the basic emotion whether the music was conveying a positive or negative feeling, proving greater difficulty in understanding feelings.

The researchers, Yaez Pal and colleagues, argue that since music communicates emotion through immersive, sensory experiences, it might offer new pathways to engage children with CU traits or other emotional recognition difficulties. The ability of music to convey feelings even when children are not yet of age to understand things could complement therapeutic or educational settings to promote empathy, social bonding and emotional understanding.

The researchers propose that musical activities like listening, singing or dancing may help children “feel” emotions more vividly, potentially overcoming some barriers presented by CU traits.

The research champions music as a vital and accessible medium to study emotion recognition in early childhood. By revealing the alternative ways children interpret feelings through sound, it opens fresh avenues to support emotional competence that is crucial for healthy development.