Perception of emotional content in musical performances by 3–7-year-old children

The emotional content expressed through musical performance has become a widely-discussed topic in music psychology during the past two decades. However, empirical evidence regarding children’s abilities in interpreting the emotional content of a musical performance is sparse. We investigated 3–7-year-old children’s abilities to interpret the emotional content expressed through performance features in music. Short musical pieces previously rated as inexpressive of emotion were recorded by three musicians with five emotional expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry and neutral) and played to 3–7-year-old children ( N = 94), adult non-musicians ( N = 83), and adult musicians ( N = 118) who made a forced-choice judgement about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed. Significant differences were observed between children, adult non-musicians and musicians in their ability to interpret the emotional content of a performance. Especially for children, the easiest emotions to identify proved to be happiness and sadness, while anger, fear and emotional neutrality appeared to be more difficult to identify. The most salient confusion patterns of the emotions (categorizing angry performance as happy, neutral performance as sad, or mixing up fear with sadness in performance) as well as the least salient ones (mixing up happiness with sadness, as well as anger with emotions other than happiness) are discussed in the context of general theories of emotion.