Neue Untersuchungen zeigen, dass Kinder im Alter von 3 bis 5 Jahren Glück, Traurigkeit, Ruhe und Angst in der Musik identifizieren können, aber dass Kinder, die weniger Anzeichen von Empathie oder Schuld zeigen, mehr Schwierigkeiten haben.

Music is a powerful tool for conveying mood, whether heard via a live performance or movie soundtrack, making it an effective medium for understanding how people identify and respond to emotions. Studies have found that children ages 5 to 11 show increasing accuracy in recognizing specific emotions in music.

However, research on emotion recognition in music among people with traits associated with “callous-unemotional” behavior—such as the absence of empathy, guilt, or open expression of feelings—is lacking. This matters because children higher in these traits are at higher risk for aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathological behaviors.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences have studied how well 144 Philadelphia-area children ages 3 to 5 recognized happiness, sadness, calmness, or fear in 5-second music clips.

They find that children can identify emotions with a level of accuracy better than a random guess, with performance improving with age. In addition, they find that children whose parents score them higher in callous-unemotional traits show poorer recognition of emotion in music overall but did not have a more difficult time recognizing fearful music. Their findings are published in Child Development.

[https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.70024](https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.70024)