Abstract
Music training is widely assumed to enhance several nonmusical abilities, including speech perception, executive functions, reading, and emotion recognition. This assumption is based primarily on cross-sectional comparisons between musicians and nonmusicians. It remains unclear, however, whether training itself is necessary to explain the musician advantages, or whether factors such as innate predispositions and informal musical experience could produce similar effects. Here, we sought to clarify this issue by examining the association between music training, music perception abilities and vocal emotion recognition. The sample (N = 169) comprised musically trained and untrained listeners who varied widely in their musical skills, as assessed through self-report and performance-based measures. The emotion recognition tasks required listeners to categorize emotions in nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., laughter, crying) and in speech prosody. Music training was associated positively with emotion recognition across tasks, but the effect was small. We also found a positive association between music perception abilities and emotion recognition in the entire sample, even with music training held constant. In fact, untrained participants with good musical abilities were as good as highly trained musicians at recognizing vocal emotions. Moreover, the association between music training and emotion recognition was fully mediated by auditory and music perception skills. Thus, in the absence of formal music training, individuals who were "naturally" musical showed musician-like performance at recognizing vocal emotions. These findings highlight an important role for factors other than music training (e.g., predispositions and informal musical experience) in associations between musical and nonmusical domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Highlights
F musicality, because musical skills are diverse and determined by multiple factors other than formal lessons
We examined associations with formal music training and, crucially, we investigated whether, in the absence of training, having good musical abilities related to enhancements in emotion recognition similar to the ones seen in musicians
Music training was associated with better emotion recognition in speech prosody and nonverbal vocalizations
Summary
F musicality, because musical skills are diverse and determined by multiple factors other than formal lessons. Recent evidence indicates that good music perception skills are associated with good performance in nonmusical domains, regardless of training Such individuals exhibit enhanced phoneme perception in a foreign language (Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2017) and more efficient neural encoding of speech (Mankel & Bidelman, 2018), mirroring the benefits observed in trained musicians. A musician advantage in emotion recognition is not always evident (Park et al, 2015; Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008), and this issue is typically explored in cross-sectional studies that do not take into account individual differences in musical abilities, in nonmusicians It remains unclear whether training itself is necessary to drive the putative advantage, or whether musical predispositions and informal engagement with music could produce similar effects
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