The effects of congruent and incongruent mimic expressions by emotions related with music on rhythm synchronization in preschoolers

This study aimed to investigate the effects of mimic congruency linked with the emotions of musical pieces on preschoolers' rhythm synchronization skills. Ninety-six preschoolers aged 60 to 71 months old in Istanbul were involved in this study. The researcher developed Musical Synchronization Task (MST) task for measuring rhythm synchronization. Cognitive flexibility was controlled with the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) task. Analyses firstly demonstrated a meaningful difference between the effects of congruent and incongruent mimic expressions by emotions related to music on rhythm synchronization. From the results of post-hoc tests, mimic – music congruency has a higher effect on rhythm synchronization than mimic – music incongruency. Secondly, the study showed congruency itself affects sync positively, regardless of the emotion types (happy or neutral) chosen for the research. Although these results are parallel to other studies developed for synchronization measurements, the study is a pioneer in the literature in terms of looking at the effect of music and facial expressions in synchronization measurement. In this research, dimensions of embodied cognition (emotion, perception, and movement) act together, the collaborative activity of the joint intention is observed, and the errors of synchronized participants had reduced to low levels thanks to the congruency of the emotional clues of mimic and music.