Katagiri June
The Florida State University, USA.
J Music Ther. 2009 Spring;46(1):15-31. doi: 10.1093/jmt/46.1.15.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of background music and song texts to teach emotional understanding to children with autism. Participants were 12 students (mean age 11.5 years) with a primary diagnosis of autism who were attending schools in Japan. Each participant was taught four emotions to decode and encode: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear by the counterbalanced treatment-order. The treatment consisted of the four conditions: (a) no contact control (NCC)--no purposeful teaching of the selected emotion, (b) contact control (CC)--teaching the selected emotion using verbal instructions alone, (c) background music (BM)--teaching the selected emotion by verbal instructions with background music representing the emotion, and singing songs (SS)--teaching the selected emotion by singing specially composed songs about the emotion. Participants were given a pretest and a posttest and received 8 individual sessions between these tests. The results indicated that all participants improved significantly in their understanding of the four selected emotions. Background music was significantly more effective than the other three conditions in improving participants' emotional understanding. The findings suggest that background music can be an effective tool to increase emotional understanding in children with autism, which is crucial to their social interactions.
本研究的目的是检验背景音乐和歌曲文本对自闭症儿童情感理解教学的影响。参与者是12名主要诊断为自闭症的学生（平均年龄11.5岁），他们在日本上学。通过平衡的治疗顺序，每位参与者被教导解码和编码四种情绪：快乐、悲伤、愤怒和恐惧。治疗包括四种条件：（a）无接触控制（NCC）——不专门教授所选情绪；（b）接触控制（CC）——仅使用口头指令教授所选情绪；（c）背景音乐（BM）——通过带有代表该情绪的背景音乐的口头指令教授所选情绪；以及唱歌（SS）——通过演唱专门创作的关于该情绪的歌曲教授所选情绪。参与者在测试前和测试后接受了测试，并在两次测试之间接受了8次个体辅导。结果表明，所有参与者对所选四种情绪的理解都有显著提高。在提高参与者的情感理解方面，背景音乐比其他三种条件显著更有效。研究结果表明，背景音乐可以成为提高自闭症儿童情感理解的有效工具，这对他们的社交互动至关重要。
