Based on recent neuroimaging findings in music neuroscience, we have proposed that the human mirror neuron system may play a central role in the perception of emotion in music (Molnar-Szakacs & Overy, 2006). A range of neuroscientific evidence indicates that musical sound is perceived not only in terms of the auditory signal, but also in terms of the temporally synchronous, hierarchically organised sequences of expressive motor acts behind the signal.  Music may evoke, in the mind of the listener, a bodily movement or motor act allowing one to experience the music in an embodied way.  It is these embodied motor representations that recruit the human mirror neuron system. As posture, gesture and facial expressions are important implicit cues in social communication, one can easily imagine that music can have similar effects in communicating emotions.

Emotion, especially as communicated by the face, the body and the voice is an active motor process. Deficits in the attribution of emotion from static facial expressions have been reported in ASD and recently acknowledged as a potential cause of social communication impairment in this population. Although there have been innumerable studies of face processing in ASD, these have predominantly been studies of static face processing and have focused on facial identity and gender. Whereas in social situations, social information is conveyed by the development of facial expressions and emotion actually attributed from dynamic facial expressions. The use of static facial expression stimuli in fMRI research has resulted in inconclusive findings. The task-dependant nature of emotion attribution deficits required consideration of the different attentional and perceptual processing demands of the tasks and supported the need for more naturalistic facial expression processing paradigms that require continuous attention and necessitate the configural processing of face percepts. The Dynamic Facial Expression Paradigm (DFEP) was developed to address these issues and provide a more naturalistic facial expression processing paradigm to quantify the attribution of emotion from dynamic facial expressions in ASD.

This study will be the first to investigate the fundamental neural components of emotion understanding through music and face perception in both typically developing children and children with ASD.

Project team:

• Principal Investigator: Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, PhD., Research Neuroscientist, Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
• Co-investigators:      
  • Elizabeth Laugeson, PsyD. , Director, The Help Group-UCLA Autism Research Alliance
  • Judith Piggot, MBChB, PhD., Medical Director, UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment Assessment Core, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior,
  • Katie Overy, PhD., Co-Director, Institute for Music in Human and Social Development (IMHSD), University of Edinburgh

This collaborative project takes place under the auspices of The Help Group – UCLA Autism Research Alliance.  Financial support is provided by a grant from The GRAMMY Foundation®.

Music provides unique and invaluable insights into the human condition, and is a vastly underused tool in education, research and therapy. If the goal of education is to produce well-rounded and balanced young adults who make creative contributions to the community, education must incorporate music and the arts to be truly holistic. Music brings enjoyment, enthusiasm, creativity and participation together in the curriculum. The goal of this study is to evaluate the impact of music education on achievement, communication and social behavior in a group of school children with ASD. To highlight and quantify the beneficial impact of music education, we aim to examine how in-school music instruction influences achievement, communication and social behavior in the everyday life of children with ASD, both in and out of the school setting.

In this theory-driven intervention study, we plan to develop and validate a music-based therapeutic approach to train children in emotion understanding. In a 12-week intervention program, we will use methods of the Orff Schulwerk approach to music education, including games, instruments, teamwork and our own paradigm pairing emotional musical excerpts with matching displays of social emotion (happy – happy, sad – sad, etc.). Orff Schulwerk is a way to teach and learn music. It is based on things children like to do: sing, chant rhymes, clap, dance, and keep a beat on anything near at hand. This novel research study will help develop a fun, engaging and cost-effective therapeutic intervention to help children with ASD recognize and understand emotions in daily life interactions. An improved ability to recognize social emotions will allow children to form more meaningful social relationships and greatly improve their quality of life by relieving social isolation.