Music helps to better recognize emotions
A team at the University of Bath led by psychologist Karin Petrini has gathered evidence that music helps to better recognize acoustically perceived emotions. The observers do not experience the perceived emotions themselves.
According to the study, music competence can improve the recognition of emotions by speakers. However, it is unclear whether it improves the recognition of emotions through other forms of communication such as sight. The Bather psychology team presented musicians and non-musicians with visual, auditory and audiovisual clips of two people communicating. Participants judged as quickly as possible whether the emotion expressed was happiness or anger, and then indicated whether they felt the emotion they had perceived.
Musicians proved to be more accurate than non-musicians in recognizing emotions based solely on acoustic information. Although music training improves the recognition of emotions through sound, it does not influence the emotions felt. The results suggest that emotional processing in music and speech may use overlapping but also different resources, or that some aspects of emotional processing respond less to music training than others.
Original article:
https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article/37/4/323/106221/Musicianship-Enhances-Perception-But-Not-Feeling
Link to the picture: Johnny Cohen / Unsplash
