Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded)

Music lessons make kids more empathetic
Researchers wanted to know whether music training could directly
cause
changes in social ability.
Fifty kids, ages 8 to 11, were randomly assigned to one of three groups.
The first group took group music classes for an entire academic year. The
delightful curriculum consisted of rhythmic improvisation, musical games,
melodic repetition, and shared musical experiences. The second group
played games that also involved imitating and interactive experiences—but
verbal mostly, no music. The third group simply attended the regular school
year. The question was: How good were the children’s social abilities at the
end of the school year? Before the experiments commenced, researchers
established baseline measures by testing the children’s social skills, such as
empathy, including Theory of Mind abilities.
The children in the music group had the most improved empathy scores.
Like the adults, these kids had a stronger ability to decode the emotional
information in their social surroundings, both verbally and nonverbally.
They also were better at imitating facial expressions. The children who took
the music class also had more empathetic responses to artificially posed
situations, as measured by the Bryant’s Index of Empathy (an instrument
used to measure pediatric empathy). The other two groups showed no such
improvement.
Said lead researcher Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, “Overall, the capacity for
empathy in children that participated in our musical group interaction

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program significantly increased.”
The experiment has since been replicated with 6-year-olds, by
researchers in Canada.
Infants are more social, too
So far, we can detect the social benefits of music lessons in older adults,
undergraduates, and elementary-school children. How far back can you
push this? Can you detect social benefits if you give music lessons to
infants
? You can’t go much earlier than that. Amazingly, the researchers
found similar findings.
Six-month-old babies took a parent-and-child music class for six
months. The instruction was based roughly on Suzuki methodology, one
that requires active group participation. Activities involved lots of singing,
lots of banging on instruments, and learning songs in class, which parents
were asked to repeat at home. Not surprisingly, this group was called the
Active Group. A second group served as the control. These parents and tots
instead listened to 
Baby Einstein
music CDs while playing with toys
together. Predictably, they were called the Passive Group.
You can actually measure social competence in babies using a complex
instrument called the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ), which assesses
infants on 14 aspects of temperament. Researchers measured both groups to
get a baseline. Then the experiment commenced. How did the babies do? If
you are a music advocate, get ready for some spine-tingling data.
The Active Group outpaced the Passive Group socially in virtually
every way you can measure it. They smiled more. They laughed more. They
were much easier to calm down when they were stressed. In limitation
assessments (a measure of how well you react to unexpected stimuli), they
exhibited much less stress than their Passive counterparts. The infants’
gestures—such as waving goodbye and pointing—were improved, a
companion paper showed. That may be important. Such prelinguistic
communication leads to more positive social interactions between parent
and child. And 
that
improves infant cognition in virtually every way you
can measure it.
What’s going on here? We don’t know for sure. The Passive Group was
exposed to the same amount of music as the Active Group, as well as the

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same amount of social interaction. Making music may simply provide an
environment where one gets to exercise greater social cooperation and
generally prosocial behaviors than when playing with toys. In this view, the
secret sauce lies not with the music, but with the interaction. Or it could be
the music itself, for both groups of children experienced sustained
interaction with their parents. Either way, a method involving music has
been found to make kids more empathetic, more relational.
Which is the point.
Though these and several other experiments are interventions, showing
whether music training directly caused the effects, the vast majority of
studies are associative in nature. Still, taken together, these studies suggest
—sometimes strongly—that music training boosts foundational speech-
processing tasks, spatial skills, the detection of emotional cues, empathy,
and baby-size social skills. Next, let’s look at the effects of simply listening
to music.
Music changes your mood
“The word is 
breast
!” my mother yelled from the kitchen. This brought my
13-year-old mind very quickly to attention. She clarified: “Music soothes
the savage 
breast
! I believe it was from some old play …” her voice trailed
off.
I was in the TV room, watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon called