Embodiment of emotions in adolescents’ musical expression

Music has been actively studied from the perspectives of emotional expression and body movement, but not during adolescence. The current study addressed music as a forum for adolescent embodied emotion expression. Based on prior research, we hypothesised that adolescents would be able to differentiate between emotions in their music-related expressive body movements based on valence and arousal characteristics. Participants ( N = 60, 17 male, mean age 14.72 years) played djembe to express five basic emotions (happiness, tenderness, sadness, anger, fear) while body movements were motion captured. Correlations of movement features with emotion-regulation tendencies, as measured by the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), were additionally explored. Adolescents demonstrated great capacity to use all measured movement features to express emotions: movement speed, variance, area and length all differed significantly between emotions. In particular, the results confirm the hypothesised connection of high arousal to high speed and acceleration and further suggest that positive valence relates to wider area and longer performance. In addition, adolescents scoring high on cognitive reappraisal gave faster and more stable performances. We discuss creative body movement as part of youth emotional development.