New research shows musical training sharpens the ability to sense emotions.
Makes sense to me. Music, especially classical, conveys many subtle emotions. Music and other arts help us develop our sense perceptions. Our perceptions shape our perspective and vice versa.
According to Dana L. Strait and a team of researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, years of musical training leave the brains of musicians better attuned to the emotional content, like anger, of vocal sounds. Ten years of cello, say, can make a person more emotionally intelligent, in some sense.
The new work is part of an emerging portrait of the broader connections between music, emotion and speech. These studies are finding that musicians are more accurate in detecting emotion — such as joy, sadness and anger — in speech samples. The effect has been found even in children as young as 7 years old, with as little as one year of music training. It is a fascinating example of how experience in one domain (music) benefits another (emotion perception). However, it is not until very recently, with the publication of the new study by Strait and her colleagues, that the biological foundation of the effect has been demonstrated.
