New find from the Kindermusik Experts

From the European Journal of Neuroscience (2009)

We've found exciting new research on music training and social-emotional understanding. New research has been completed by Nina Kraus at Northwestern (if you attended Debby Pool's convention presentation, you saw Nina in the video shared by Debby) and Ric Ashley at Northwestern (who is Kindermusik educator Allison Ashley’s husband)—showing that music training enhances a person’s ability to pick up clues (in speech) about another person’s emotional state. The article is posted below:

From the European Journal of Neuroscience 29:661-668 (2009)

Musical experience and neural efficiency: effects of training on subcortical processing of vocal expressions of emotion -- by D. L. Strait, E. Skoe, N. Kraus, & R. Ashley (Auditory Neuroscience and Music Cognition Laboratories of Northwestern University)

Musicians exhibit enhanced perception of emotion in speech, although the biological foundations for this advantage remain unconfirmed. In order to gain a better understanding for the influences of musical experience on neural processing of emotionally salient sounds, we recorded brainstem potentials to affective human vocal sounds. Musicians showed enhanced time-domain response magnitude to the most spectrally complex portions of the stimulus and decreased magnitude to more periodic, less complex portions. Enhanced phase-locking to stimulus periodicity was likewise seen in musicians' responses to highly complex portions. These results suggest that auditory expertise engenders both enhancement and efficiency of subcortical neural responses that are intricately connected with acoustic features important for the communication of emotional states. Our findings provide the first biological evidence for behavioral observations indicating that musical training enhances the perception of vocally expressed emotion in addition to establishing a subcortical role in the auditory processing of emotional cues.