A influência da música na habilidade de reconhecimento de expressões faciais da emoção em idosos

Abstract

Recognition of facial emotions is a cognitive skill, also known as social cognition. Music, in turn, has the ability to evoke and transmit feelings, thus creating a context that can influence the perception of emotions. Despite several studies carried out on the recognition of facial emotions, little is known about the influence of music on this skill. Therefore, this study evaluated the influence of music on the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions. Through the Penn Emotion Recognition Test, the ability to recognize facial expression of emotion was assessed in 20 healthy elderly people in two moments, the first being baseline and the second called retest, in which the participants performed the test while listening to a song. The participants were organized into two groups according to the music presented in the retest: sad group, composed of 10 participants who underwent the retest while listening to the sad music; and a happy group composed of 10 participants who performed the retest while listening to happy music. The influence of music was verified in each group by emotion and level of intensity of emotion through statistical tests. There were no statistically significant changes between baseline and retest conditions in any group studied. However, when evaluating the responses qualitatively, there is a trend towards greater recognition of facial expressions under musical stimulus. Music did not influence the recognition of facial expressions of emotion in the elderly.