First Tones: Artistic Communal Practices for 4 and 5 Year Old Children

This project aims to investigate the effects of a communal musical practice intervention on behaviors and neural markers of mental health in 4- and 5-year-old children. Children primarily search for emotional security, relational stability, and a sense of belonging from their immediate families, apart from school environments. Thus, there is great concern for children who experience family adversity and struggle to find belonging and stability at home.

A growing body of literature suggests that children who are born into dysfunctional, unstable family environments are at a much higher risk of future family instability, poorer life outcomes, and mental illness compared to children in more protected environments. Childhood adversity such as abuse, being raised in poverty, impaired parenting, etc., has been shown to drastically increase the likelihood of childhood mental disorders, behavioral problems, and subsequent depression in adulthood.

A relationship between lower socioeconomic position and experiencing childhood adversity has been found, and despite being at higher risk for the development of mental disorders, individuals in lower socioeconomic positions have reduced access to mental health treatment. Therefore, developing low-cost group-based interventions for children experiencing childhood adversity is of fundamental importance.

Communal singing interventions are low-cost and have shown significant benefits in other populations. For instance, Sung et al. explored the effects of a communal music intervention on anxiety and agitation symptoms in institutionalized older individuals with dementia. Individuals who participated in the 12-session intervention experienced a significant decrease in anxiety compared to those in a control group. Similarly, Adery and Park reported lower depression scores in individuals with psychiatric symptoms, namely psychosis and depression, who underwent a one-hour, eight-week communal singing intervention. Although no difference was seen for psychotic symptoms, individuals reported lower levels of loneliness, which could help explain some of the mechanisms through which communal music-making improves mental health.

Neuroimaging studies have shown significant changes in brain activity and connectivity following music-based interventions. For example, Quinci et al. reported increased functional connectivity between a mask containing auditory processing regions (e.g., superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and Heschl's gyrus) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) following intervention. These results are promising because the mPFC, for example, has been shown to be implicated in the maintenance of psychiatric disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, the mPFC is associated with reward processing. Interestingly, investigating reward-related processes has helped explain the pathophysiology of many psychiatric disorders.

Improving reward processing may be one of the mechanisms through which communal music-making improves mental health. Music listening has been associated with reward responses in the brain, and exploring the interaction between communal music-making, reward processing, and mental health markers warrants investigation. For instance, current promising interventions for some psychiatric disorders focus on improving reward processing as a means to decrease symptoms.

Building a sense of belonging may also be a mechanism involved in communal music-making. Besides the decreased loneliness experienced by individuals with psychosis following a choir-singing intervention, suggesting that singing together increased their sense of being connected to others, one qualitative study with individuals suffering from PTSD who underwent a communal music-making intervention that included communal performances reported an increased sense of belonging as well as self-confidence following intervention. Furthermore, in another qualitative study investigating the effects of communal singing in individuals with different mental disorders, Dingle et al. report increased feelings of connectedness to other members of the choir and the community in general. Finally, singing together also increases the levels of oxytocin, an important mediator of social behavior. Like reward processing, understanding the role of the sense of belonging in communal music-making warrants investigation.