Infant Perception of Emotions from Music:Evidence from Violation-of-Expectation Paradigm
The capacity of infants to perceive emotions in music has been debated.Previous studies often mixed music emotion perception with acoustic processing.To address this,the violation-of-expectation(VoE)paradigm was employed to investigate whether infants aged 10～20 months form emotional expectations about facial expressions after listening to music.Infants were presented with either happy or sad music,followed by adult facial expressions that were either consistent or inconsistent with the emotion of the music.Eye-tracking technology was used to measure infants'looking time and pupil response to the facial expressions.The results revealed that infants looked significantly longer at facial expressions inconsistent with the emotion of music,which indicates a violation of their expectations.Furthermore,greater pupil dilation was observed when facial expressions were consistent with the emotion of music,which suggests that music and facial expressions may evoke similar emotional responses in infants.These findings indicate that infants as young as 10～20 months can distinguish between happy and sad emotions in music and form emotional expectations that guide their subsequent processing of facial expressions.
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