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Turn that music down! Affective musical bursts cause an auditory dominance in children recognising bodily emotions

Ross, P.; Williams, E.; Herbert, G.; Manning, L.; Lee, B.

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Authors

E. Williams

G. Herbert

L. Manning

B. Lee



Abstract

Previous work has shown that different sensory channels are prioritized across the life course, with children preferentially responding to auditory information. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether the mechanism that drives this auditory dominance in children occurs at the level of encoding (overshadowing) or when the information is integrated to form a response (response competition). Given that response competition is dependent on a modality integration attempt, a combination of stimuli that could not be integrated was used so that if children’s auditory dominance persisted, this would provide evidence for the overshadowing over the response competition mechanism. Younger children (≤7 years), older children (8–11 years), and adults (18+ years) were asked to recognize the emotion (happy or fearful) in either nonvocal auditory musical emotional bursts or human visual bodily expressions of emotion in three conditions: unimodal, congruent bimodal, and incongruent bimodal. We found that children performed significantly worse at recognizing emotional bodies when they heard (and were told to ignore) musical emotional bursts. This provides the first evidence for auditory dominance in both younger and older children when presented with modally incongruent emotional stimuli. The continued presence of auditory dominance, despite the lack of modality integration, was taken as supportive evidence for the overshadowing explanation. These findings are discussed in relation to educational considerations, and future sensory dominance investigations and models are proposed.

Citation

Ross, P., Williams, E., Herbert, G., Manning, L., & Lee, B. (2023). Turn that music down! Affective musical bursts cause an auditory dominance in children recognising bodily emotions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 230, Article 105632. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105632

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jan 13, 2023
Online Publication Date Jan 31, 2023
Publication Date 2023-06
Deposit Date Oct 10, 2022
Publicly Available Date Feb 3, 2023
Journal Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
Print ISSN 0022-0965
Electronic ISSN 1096-0457
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 230
Article Number 105632
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105632
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1192018

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