Emotional intelligence — the ability to recognise, understand, manage, and respond to emotions in oneself and others — is, according to psychologist and EI pioneer Dr. Daniel Goleman, a stronger predictor of life success than IQ. And music is one of the most powerful tools available to parents and educators for building it.
Quick Facts: Music and Emotional Intelligence
- •A 2013 study in the Journal of Research in Music Education found that children in music programmes showed significantly higher empathy scores than matched controls
- •Music with lyrics teaches emotion vocabulary — words like lonely, joyful, heartbroken, peaceful
- •Group singing releases oxytocin — the bonding hormone — in all participants simultaneously
- •Playing music with others requires 'emotional attunement' — reading partners' feelings in real time
- •Children who can identify emotions in music show stronger facial emotion recognition (Trimmer & Cuddy, 2008)
The Four Pathways from Music to Emotional Intelligence
Music builds emotional intelligence through four distinct mechanisms, each supported by its own body of research:
1. Emotion Vocabulary
Songs explicitly name emotions in context — 'If you're happy and you know it', 'Don't you cry', 'Hush now my baby'. For young children who lack the vocabulary to label their own internal states, songs provide the words. Research from Dr. Marc Brackett at Yale's Centre for Emotional Intelligence shows that children with larger emotion vocabularies show better emotion regulation and social competence — and songs are one of the primary ways this vocabulary is acquired.
2. Empathy Through Perspective-Taking
Narrative songs and folk songs invite children to inhabit the emotional states of characters — a dragon that's lonely, a bear that's lost, a child missing a parent. This musical perspective-taking builds the same cognitive skills as literary empathy. Research from Dr. Emery Schubert at the University of New South Wales shows that children who regularly engage with emotionally expressive music show better identification of emotions in others.
3. Co-Regulation Through Lullabies
When a parent sings a lullaby to a distressed infant, they are performing emotional co-regulation — using their own regulated state to calm the child's dysregulated state. Over hundreds of repetitions in the first years of life, this co-regulation builds the child's own capacity for self-regulation. Research from Dr. Colwyn Trevarthen at the University of Edinburgh describes this as 'communicative musicality' — the musical structure of early parent-child interaction that forms the foundation of emotional development.
4. Social Bonding Through Shared Music
Group singing and music making are among the most powerful social bonding activities available to children. A 2014 study by Dr. Laura Cirelli at the University of Toronto found that babies who were bounced in synchrony with another person showed significantly greater helping behaviour toward that person — suggesting that synchronous musical movement builds prosocial behaviour from infancy.