ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Impact of music-based interventions on subjective well-being: a meta-analysis of listening, training, and therapy in clinical and nonclinical populations.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- The influence of maternal singing on well-being, postpartum depression and bonding - a randomised, controlled trial.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2021Trial
- The reciprocal relationship between maternal infant-directed singing and infant gaze.Musicae scientiae : the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music · 2026Article
- The effect of music familiarity on preschoolers' heart rate during musical engagement: preliminary report.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Listeners' baseline autonomic states associated with distinct music-physiology response patterns.European heart journal. Imaging methods and practice · 2026Article
- Chants across seven traditions share acoustic traits that enhance subjective relaxation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, A Global Corpus of Vocal Music.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Music Therapy with Preterm Infants and Their Families after Hospital Discharge: An Integrative Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Review
- The difference of affect improvement effect of music intervention in aerobic exercise at different time periods.Frontiers in physiology · 2024Article
- Early social communication through music: State of the art and future perspectives.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2023Review
- Universal interpretations of vocal music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Article
- Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- The Effect of Music Intervention on Fetal Education via Doppler Fetal Monitor.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Anticipatory regulation of cardiovascular system on the emergence of auditory-motor interaction in young infants.Experimental brain research · 2022Article
- Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N = 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.