Babies Relax When Listening To Unfamiliar Lullabies From Other Cultures

By Emma Young The controversial idea that there are universals in the ways we use music received a boost in 2018, with the finding that people from 60 different countries were pretty good at judging whether a totally unfamiliar piece of music from another culture was intended to soothe a baby or to be danced to. Now, new research involving some of the same team has revealed that foreign lullabies that babies have never heard before work to relax them.  Constance M. Bainbridge and Mila Bertolo from Harvard University led the new study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, on 144 babies with an average age of 7 months. After being fitted with sensors to monitor their heart rate and level of sweating, each baby sat in a high chair or recliner or on its parent’s lap while watching animated characters lip-synching to 14-second bursts of songs. These songs came from the Natural History of Song Discography, a collection of songs from around the world, and eight were used as lullabies in the societies in which they were selected. The rest were intended to express love, heal the sick or be danced to. All of the songs were sung by solo vocalists, without background music. As well as looking at the heart rate and skin sweating data, the team used video of the babies’ faces to monitor their pupil size. If these measures decreased, this would indicate that the baby was relaxing. Based on some of these measures, at least, the team found that babies did indeed seem mor...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Babies Cross-cultural Developmental Music Source Type: blogs