Children Who Feel More, Gain More From Music: Empathy Emerges as the Engine of Musical Pleasure Before Adolescence

Music is one of the most universal sources of pleasure in human life, yet the same song that sends one person into raptures can leave another entirely unmoved. For decades, scientists studying this variability in adults have noticed a striking pattern: people who score high on empathy—the capacity to share, understand, and respond to the emotional states of others—consistently report stronger emotional responses to music, greater enjoyment of emotionally complex pieces, and more frequent use of music for emotional self-regulation. Now, a new study published in Frontiers in Cognition shows that this empathy–musical pleasure link is already firmly in place by early primary school age, long before music becomes entangled with identity, peer affiliation, and the autonomous listening habits of adolescence.

The research, led by Maria Celeste Fasano of Aarhus University together with Maria Grazia Monaci and Gianni Nuti of the University of Valle d’Aosta and Manuela Filippa of the University of Geneva, examined 621 children aged 7 to 9 years. The team adapted the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), a well-established adult instrument measuring sensitivity to musical reward across five theoretically grounded components—Emotional Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, Musical Seeking, and Sensory-Motor—into a child-friendly Italian version, the BMRQ-MC. Children completed the questionnaire individually in their school computer labs, with trained administrators reading each item aloud to support comprehension, while responses were recorded privately on personal tablets. The study was conducted as part of a multi-year action-research program on music education and child development in the Piedmont and Aosta Valley regions of Italy.

Establishing that musical reward can be reliably measured in children this young was itself a formidable technical challenge. The researchers first ran a confirmatory factor analysis on the 19-item adapted questionnaire, testing whether the original five-factor adult structure would hold in this age group. The overall model showed acceptable fit, but one subscale—Musical Seeking, which covers behaviors such as autonomous music discovery and spending money on music—performed poorly. Two of its three items showed weak factor loadings, and its internal consistency collapsed to a Cronbach’s alpha of just 0.16, far below any acceptable threshold. The problem, the authors argue, is developmental rather than statistical: children aged 7 to 9 rarely purchase music independently or deliberately seek out new artists in the ways adult questionnaires assume. One item about spending money on music had to be reworded to reflect that parents, not children, make such purchases, and another about informing oneself about music was dropped entirely after a pilot study showed most children could not understand it.

When the problematic Musical Seeking factor was removed, the remaining four-factor model—Emotional Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, and Sensory-Motor—showed substantially improved fit, with the Comparative Fit Index rising from 0.905 to 0.931 and the Tucker-Lewis Index climbing from 0.885 to 0.916. Crucially, the researchers then tested whether this reduced structure operated identically for girls and boys using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. The model demonstrated configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance across gender, meaning the questionnaire captures the same underlying construct in both groups and supports valid group comparisons. Internal consistency of the total scale was excellent, with Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega both reaching 0.84, and each retained subscale exceeded the minimum acceptable composite reliability threshold of 0.60.

With the measurement model established, the team turned to the central question: is musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood linked to empathy, as it is in adults? Children also completed the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA), a 14-item self-report instrument measuring affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and prosocial motivation. The results were unambiguous. The global BMRQ-MC score correlated strongly and positively with overall empathy, r = 0.490, p < 0.001—a magnitude the authors note sustains the association between the two constructs without indicating they are one and the same. At the subscale level, affective empathy showed the strongest associations across the board, particularly with the Emotional Evocation dimension of musical reward, r = 0.468, p < 0.001. In other words, children who report that they feel sad when a friend is sad also report getting emotional listening to certain pieces of music.

This pattern is theoretically coherent with contemporary models of empathy, which distinguish affective sharing from cognitive perspective taking. Music engages affective resonance mechanisms such as emotional contagion—processes through which perceived expressive cues are transformed into felt emotion—and these processes conceptually overlap with core components of empathic responding. Converging neural evidence from earlier work by the same team suggests that in preadolescents, individual differences in BMRQ-measured musical reward are reflected in the engagement of reward-related brain networks during music listening, including the orbitofrontal cortex reward system, which substantially overlap with neural systems supporting affective and socio-emotional processing. The present findings extend this evidence to younger children and demonstrate that the empathy–musical reward association is already robust by early primary school age.

Just as revealing was what did not predict musical reward. The researchers assessed objective musical ability using two subtests from the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Musical Abilities (MBEMA), in which children judged whether pairs of short melodies were the same or different, targeting either melodic scale violations or rhythmic changes. Neither melody discrimination nor rhythm discrimination showed any meaningful association with musical reward sensitivity at the global level. Everyday musical engagement, measured through a brief adapted questionnaire indexing instrument lessons, practice frequency, and ensemble participation, showed only a small positive correlation with musical reward, driven primarily by the Social Reward dimension. Notably, engagement scores were themselves unrelated to MBEMA performance, suggesting that in middle childhood, how often children interact with music does not yet closely map onto their perceptual musical skills.

A hierarchical multiple regression analysis clarified the relative contributions of these factors while controlling for gender. Girls scored significantly higher than boys on musical reward sensitivity across the global score and all four retained subscales, yet no corresponding gender differences emerged for musical engagement or objective musical ability, indicating the difference is unlikely to be explained by higher participation or better perceptual skills. Empathy emerged as the strongest predictor of musical reward, explaining an additional 20.5% of the variance beyond gender. Musical engagement explained a much smaller but statistically significant additional share of 1.1%, whereas musical abilities contributed nothing meaningful to the model. The final model explained 29.1% of the variance in musical reward sensitivity, with empathy remaining the dominant predictor throughout.

The findings carry implications that reach beyond the laboratory. If musical reward in middle childhood is grounded primarily in socio-emotional dispositions and socially embedded musical experiences rather than in technical or perceptual proficiency, then music activities in schools may support engagement not only through skill acquisition but through emotionally and interpersonally meaningful forms of participation. This may be particularly relevant for collective and inclusive musical activities such as classroom singing, ensemble participation, or shared music-making experiences. A growing literature has reported promising socio-emotional and motivational outcomes associated with collective music education and orchestral training programs in childhood, including increased social engagement, cooperative behavior, and school-related engagement. Musical enjoyment may therefore precede, rather than result from, the development of musical skills, potentially playing a motivational role in later musical learning.

The authors caution that the cross-sectional design precludes conclusions about the direction of the empathy–musical reward association, and it remains possible that both constructs partly reflect shared underlying socio-emotional or neurodevelopmental factors. Future longitudinal research spanning middle childhood and adolescence will be needed to clarify how these relationships evolve as music increasingly assumes identity-related and self-regulatory functions. Nevertheless, the study establishes for the first time that musical reward sensitivity can be reliably assessed from the age of seven using a reduced four-factor structure, and it positions empathy as a key early correlate of musical pleasure. Because empathy is a well-established precursor of prosocial understanding and behavior, the findings suggest that individual differences in how rewarding music feels may already be embedded in broader socio-emotional dispositions that support children’s developing social orientation—making music not merely a domain for technical training, but a meaningful socio-emotional resource in educational settings.

Subject of Research: Neuroscience

Article Title: Empathy and musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood: a psychometric validation of the Barcelona music reward questionnaire in children aged 7–9

Article References: Fasano, M. C., Monaci, M. G., Nuti, G., & Filippa, M. (2026). Empathy and musical reward sensitivity in middle childhood: a psychometric validation of the Barcelona music reward questionnaire in children aged 7–9. Frontiers in Cognition, 5, Article 1804916. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcogn.2026.1804916

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcogn.2026.1804916

Keywords: empathy, musical reward, middle childhood, Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, psychometrics, affective empathy, music education, developmental psychology, musical, reward, sensitivity, middle