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

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology 2023-06, Vol.230, p.105632-105632, Article 105632
• Main Authors: Ross, Paddy, Williams, Ella, Herbert, Gemma, Manning, Laura, Lee, Becca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Auditory dominance; Auditory Perception - physiology; Body; Child; Development; Emotion recognition; Emotions - physiology; Fear; Happiness; Humans; Music; Music - psychology
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105632

•Developmental emotion recognition research rarely examines recognition from more than one modality at a time.•Children show a ‘reverse Colavita effect’ in processing simple multisensory audio-visual stimuli, showing an auditory dominance.•Recently we showed that this phenomenon extends to emotionally meaningful stimuli.•Here we explore the mechanisms behind this effect by using modally incongruent emotional music.•We found that children still show an auditory dominance even when the auditory stimuli are not human. 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.