Maternal Singing Modulates Infant Arousal

By Tali Shenfield, Sandra E. Trehub, T. Nakata. 2003

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examined the effect of maternal singing on the arousal levels of healthy, non-distressed infants. Mothers sang to their 6-month-old infants for 10 minutes, after which they continued interacting for another 10 minutes. To estimate infant arousal, we gathered saliva samples from infants immediately before the mothers began singing and 20 minutes later. Laboratory analyses of the saliva samples revealed that salivary cortisol levels converged from baseline to post-test periods. Specifically, infants with lower baseline levels exhibited modest cortisol increases in response to maternal singing; those with higher baseline levels exhibited modest reductions. This convergence of arousal levels was confirmed by reduced variability in cortisol values from baseline to post-test. These findings are consistent with the view that maternal singing modulates the arousal of prelinguistic infants.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Pharmacy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8231e7505216ceba239d9c7136bb3e9ba080731d

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

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In Pharmacy

Citations in the corpus

Music and Cognitive Abilities (2005, background): “In principle, similar short-term cognitive benefits might be evident among infants, whose arousal level is altered by exposure to maternal singing ( Shenfield, Trehub, & Nakata, 2003 ).”
The effects of mother–infant singing on emotional closeness, affect, anxiety, and stress hormones (2018, background): “…a more focused way of engaging with babies than playing and talking to them and has been shown to help maintain eye contact; Nakata & Trehub, 2004; Shenfield et al. 2003), it remains unknown from this experiment whether the percentage of time that mothers focused exclusively on their infant…”
Infants' responsiveness to maternal speech and singing (2004, background): “The success of music in regulating arousal is notable in the case of premature infants who have life-threatening problems (Ca sidy & Standley, 1995; Lorch, Lorch, Diefendorf, & Earl, 1994) and even for healthy 6-month-olds (Shenfield et al., 2003).”
Singing Delays the Onset of Infant Distress (2016, background): “Live maternal singing in face-to-face contexts, even without touch, modulates infant arousal (Shenfield et al., 2003).”
On musical parenting of young children: musical beliefs and behaviors of mothers and infants (2005, background): “…synchrony with recent experimental findings suggesting that maternal singing reduces stress in infants by lowering cortisol levels on their saliva (Shenfield et al., 2003), and that musical interactions with infants and young children are related to parental mental states (Gratier, 1999;…”