title: Musical affect regulation in infancy.
abstract: Adolescents and adults commonly use music for various forms of affect regulation, including relaxation, revitalization, distraction, and elicitation of pleasant memories. Mothers throughout the world also sing to their infants, with affect regulation as the principal goal. To date, the study of maternal singing has focused largely on its acoustic features and its consequences for infant attention. We describe recent laboratory research that explores the consequences of singing for infant affect regulation. Such work reveals that listening to recordings of play songs can maintain 6- to 9-month-old infants in a relatively contented or neutral state considerably longer than recordings of infant-directed or adult-directed speech. When 10-month-old infants fuss or cry and are highly aroused, mothers' multimodal singing is more effective than maternal speech at inducing recovery from such distress. Moreover, play songs are more effective than lullabies at reducing arousal in Western infants. We explore the implications of these findings along with possible practical applications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Sandra E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Trehub
authors.forename: Niusha
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ghazban
authors.forename: Mariève
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Corbeil
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009035:Mothers; D009146:Music; D010988:Play and Playthings; D013060:Speech; D013315:Stress, Psychological
keywords: affect regulation; infants; mothers; music; singing