Math essay

Jasmine Eaddy

Southern New Hampshire University

Mat 133

Three: Introduction, Analysis, and Discussion

The topic I chose was Children’s recognition of emotion in music and speech related to their understanding of speech prosody. This topic focus was basically seeing if children were able to recognize emotional cues in music and identify the specific emotion being presented in the music displayed. This study consisted of “60 children ages 6 to 11 as well as 51 university students”

([ CITATION Vid171 \l 1033]. The university students were to judge the emotions of 10 musical excerpts, 10 inflected speech clips, and 10 affect burst clips. There was a variety of stimuli presented intended to convey sadness, anger, fear, pride, as well as happiness. Therefore, with doing the study Vidas was able to examine whether recognition of emotion in music and speech prosody develops in parallel. The researchers test their hypotheses related to the research questions by drawing hypothesis such as of the sample size which cons111 participants, more than half (56.8%) had some musical training beyond school classroom music. We also expected that overall, recognition would improve on all types of stimuli with age. We further hypothesized that children’s recognition of the stimuli would depend on the emotions conveyed, as well as the type of cue provided. For inflected speech, happiness and sadness were the most recognized, followed by anger, while fear was the least recognized.

During the testing, each emotion was presented twice per type of stimulus. Researchers

Vidas, Dingle, & Nelson found that “recognition of emotions in music and speech developed in

parallel, and adult-levels of recognition develop later for these stimuli than for affect bursts”

[ CITATION Vid171 \l 1033]. The research study being proposed in this study is can children

recognize emotions in music. And if so, how well compared to the average adult? Researchers

Vidas, Dingle, & Nelson hypothesized that a child’s recognition of emotions that are present in

music will be parallel to that child’s speech development. With this hypothesis it could possibly

aid in the developmental potential of a child by exposing them to music early on to stimulate

their ability to develop speech with there being a correlation between the two. The simple and enjoyable act of making music with your child naturally fosters important social and emotional skills, such as self-regulation, self-confidence, leadership skills, social skills, and socio-emotional intelligence. It has been suggested that music making may have evolved as a tool for experiencing shared intentionality, and maintaining social cohesion (Cross, 2016; Kirschner & Tomasello, 2010; Patel, 2008).

Feedback:

I. Analyze the research methods of the study. In other words, how did the researchers test their hypotheses related to the research questions? What, if any, assumptions did the researchers make in order to conduct their research?

-The researchers test their hypotheses with the results of inflected speech, happiness and sadness were the most recognized, followed by anger, while fear was the least recognized.

II. Examine the outcomes of those tests. What were the major findings (i.e., did they reject or fail to reject the hypotheses and why)? Were the findings statistically significant (i.e., what was the p-value)?

-The finding of the hypotheses from the main analysis where the dependent variable was participants’ recognition of the emotion in the stimulus.1 It states that followed up all significant effects with Bonferroni-corrected post hoc t-tests; all post hoc test p-values presented are Bonferroni corrected. As stated, before there were no significant change scores on music (M = 0.77) and speech (M = 0.78), p = 1.0. In contrast, scores on affect bursts (M = 0.85) were significantly higher than for both music and speech, ps < .001.

III. Evaluate the conclusions drawn by the researchers. Do you think the conclusions are valid based on the data and hypothesis test results? Is there sufficient data to support the researchers’ generalizations? Why or why not?

-Yes, I do believe my conclusions is valid based on the data and hypothesis test results because as expected, recognition scores for music and speech were positively correlated. Scores for music were also correlated with scores for affect bursts, as were scores for speech.

Calligeros, R., Vidas, D., Nelson, N. L., Dingle, G. A. (2018). Development of emotion recognition in music and vocal bursts. Manuscript in preparation

Cross, I. (2016). The nature of music and its evolution. In Hallam, S., Cross, I., Thaut, M. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of music psychology (2nd ed., pp. 3–17). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198722946.001.0001