Emotion regulation is an umbrella term to describe interactive, goal-dependent explicit and implicit processes that are intended to help an individual manage and shift an emotional experience. The primary window for appropriate emotion regulation development occurs during the infant, toddler, and preschool years. Atypical emotion regulation development is considered a risk factor for mental health problems and has been implicated as a primary mechanism underlying childhood pathologies. Current treatments are predominantly verbal- and behavioral-based and lack the opportunity to practice in-the-moment (...) management of emotionally charged situations. There is also an absence of caregiver-child interaction in these treatment strategies. Based on behavioral and neural support for music as a therapeutic mechanism, the incorporation of intentional music experiences, facilitated by a music therapist, may be one way to address these limitations. Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation is an interactive therapist-child music-based intervention for emotion regulation development practice in preschoolers. The Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention uses the deliberate contour and temporal structure of a music therapy session to mirror the changing flow of the caregiver-child interaction through the alternation of high arousal and low arousal music experiences. The purpose of this paper is to describe the Therapeutic Function of Music, a theory-based description of the structural characteristics for a music-based stimulus to musically facilitate developmentally appropriate high arousal and low arousal in-the-moment emotion regulation experiences. The Therapeutic Function of Music analysis is based on a review of the music theory, music neuroscience, and music development literature and provides a preliminary model of the structural characteristics of the music as a core component of the Musical Contour Regulation Facilitation intervention. (shrink)

The study of emotional changes after brain injury has contributed enormously to the understanding of the neural basis of emotion. However, little attention has been placed on the methods used to elicit emotional responses in people with brain damage. Of particular interest are subjects with right hemisphere [RH] cortical lesions, who have been described as presenting impairment in emotional processing. In this article, an internal and external mood induction procedure [MIP] was used to trigger positive and negative emotions, in a (...) sample of 10 participants with RH damage, and 15 healthy controls. Emotional experience was registered by using a self-report questionnaire. As observed in previous studies, internal and external MIPs were equally effective in eliciting the target emotion, but the internal procedure generated higher levels of intensity. Remarkably, participants with RH lesions were equally able to experience both positive and negative affect. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the RH in the capacity to experience negative emotions. (shrink)

Difficulties in recognizing emotional signals might have serious implications for social interactions. Neurodegenerative diseases that affect neural networks involved in emotional displays processing might thus be connected with a disproportionate impairment in social life. This study aimed at examining the ability to decode basic emotions from dynamic visual displays in mild to moderate dementia. Thirty old adults diagnosed as demented, and 30 gender-matched healthy controls were administered a measure of emotion evaluation. The groups did not differ significantly in age and (...) educational level. The emotion evaluation test was designed to examine a person’s ability to visually identify basic emotions and discriminate these from neutral expressions, when they were expressed as dynamic, subtle, day-to-day expressions. Results showed that demented participants had a great difficulty in recognizing the positively valenced emotions of happiness and pleasant surprise, while sadness, anger, and anxiety were the easiest emotions to recognize. Healthy controls were almost excellent on happiness recognition, while discrimination of non-emotional displays was the most difficult condition often mislabeled as anxiety or pleasant surprise. Results were mainly discussed in terms of socio-emotional selectivity theory positing that only older adults capable of exerting cognitive controlled favor emotional over non-emotional and positive over negative information. EWW141022DXN. (shrink)