Festival of Ideas: Musical mayhem Credit: University of Cambridge
A year-long study on children's music-making indicates that playing music in groups on a regular basis greatly improves a child's ability to empathise with others. We believe music to be one of the most welcoming and enjoyable - as well as extremely effective - mediums through which 'empathy education' can be achieved." - —Tal-Chen Rabinowitch Researchers looking at group education sessions for 8 to 11 year old children have shown that engaging in regular music-based activities with others - from ensembles to simple rhythmic exercises - can conspicuously advance empathy development, increasing a child's capacity to recognise and consider the emotions of others. A total of 52 children - boys and girls - were split into three groups at random. One of these groups met on a weekly basis to interact through musical games devised by the researchers, while the other two acted as control groups - one met with the same regularity but activities focused on words and drama but not music, the other received no additional activities. Using standard and novel techniques such as answering questions designed to test compassion, and responding to emotion in facial expressions and movies, each child's level of emotional empathy was evaluated at the start of the study and then again after a year. The researchers found that children in the music-based activity group showed a substantial increase in empathy scores and a higher average score compared to the other groups. "These results bear out our hypothesis that certain components of musical interaction may enhance a capacity for emotional empathy, which continues outside the musical context," says Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, from the Centre for Music and Science, who led the study.
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