Category: happiness

Plenty of research has looked at adults’ emotional responses to music. But research with babies is more piecemeal and eclectic, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of asking them what they like. Researchers know that babies can hear and remember music even while they are still in the womb. And one curious study found that newborn babies prefer Bach to Aerosmith.

Most systematic work has found young babies have clear preferences for consonance over dissonance and can remember the tempo and timbre of music they’ve heard before. Babies prefer the female voice but like it even more when it takes on the qualities of “motherese” (the high-energy singsong tone we all naturally adopt when talking to babies). But their emotional responses to music is a bit more of a mystery. What kind of music makes them calm and content? And what makes them happy?

I am an expert on baby laughter and was intrigued when the C&G baby club approached me and music psychologist Lauren Stewart to create “a song scientifically proven to make babies happy” that they could give away to parents. We thought this was an interesting challenge. However, our first proviso was that they shouldn’t use the word “prove”. Our second was that they had let us do real science. They readily agreed.

The first step was to discover what was already known about the sounds and music that might make babies happy. We had some experience. My previous work on the Baby Laughter project had asked parents about the nursery rhymes and silly sounds that appealed to babies. Lauren’s previous research has looked at “earworms”, songs that get stuck in your head. But we discovered surprisingly little research on babies’ musical preferences. This was encouraging as it meant this was a worthwhile project from a scientific point of view.

The next step was to find the right composer: Grammy-award winner Imogen Heap. Imogen is a highly tech-savvy musician who just happened to have an 18-month-old daughter of her own. She was also intrigued by the challenges of the project. Few musicians had taken on the task of writing real music to excite babies while still appealing to parents. Musician Michael Janisch recorded a whole album of Jazz for Babies, but that was very slow and designed to soothe babies. Most music written specifically for babies sounds frankly deranged.

We met with Heap and gave her a set of recommendations based on what we had discovered from the past research. The song ought to be in an major key with a simple and repetitive main melody with musical devices like drum rolls, key changes and rising pitch glides to provide opportunities for anticipation and surprise. Because babies’ heart rates are much faster than ours so the music ought to be more uptempo than we would expect. And finally, it should have an energetic female vocal, ideally recorded in the presence of an actual baby.

Setting up the experiment

Fortunately Heap had her daughter, Scout, to help her with the composition. Heap created four melodies for us to test in the lab, two fast and two slow ones. For each of these she created a version with and without simple sung lyrics. Some 26 babies between six and 12 months then came to our lab with their mums and a few dads to give us their opinion. Amazingly most of the parents and 20 out of 26 babies seemed to share a clear preference for one particular melody. In line with our predictions this was a faster melody. Even more amazingly, this was the tune that had started out as a little ditty made up by Scout.

We knew which song the mums liked because we could ask them. We also asked the parents to tell us what their babies preferred best, because they are the experts on their own babies. But we also filmed the babies’ responses and coded the videos for laughs, smiles and dancing.

Now that we had a winning melody, Heap needed to turn it into a full-length song and it needed to be funny (to a baby). The secret was to make it silly and make it social. Around 2,500 parents from the C&G baby club and Heapäs fan club voted on silly sounds that made their babies happy. The top ten sounds included “boo!” (66%), raspberries (57%), sneezing (51%), animal sounds (23%) and baby laughter (28%). We also know babies respond better to “plosive” vocal sounds like “pa” and “ba” compared to “sonorant” sounds like “la”. Heap very cleverly worked many of these elements into the song.

Next it needed to be something that parents could enjoy themselves and share with their children. Happiness is a shared emotion and the success of nursery rhymes is that they are interactive. Heap carefully crafted the lyrics to tell a joyous tale of how we love our little babies wherever we are – from the sky to the ocean, on a bike or on a rocket. The transport theme permitted lots of plosives “beep, beep” and bouncing actions.

Our baby music consultants came back to the lab and listened to two slightly different sketches of the full song. This time we found that slightly slower seemed to work better (163 vs 168 beats per minute). Perhaps because it gave parents and babies a little more time to respond to the lyrics. We also found that the chorus was the most effective part of the song and determined which lyrics and sound effects worked better or worse.

After one final round of tweaks from Heap, we went for a different kind of test. We assembled about 20 of the babies in one room and played them the song all together. If you ever met an excited toddler or young baby, you will know that two and a half minutes is a long time to hold the attention of even one child, let alone two dozen. When The Happy Song played we were met by a sea of entranced little faces. This final bit wasn’t the most scientific as tests go but it definitely convinced me that we had a hit on our hands.

Now that we have a song that is both new and highly baby friendly, Lauren and I have a range of follow-up studies planned. We are planning to use the song in a range of experiments looking at how parents introduce their babies to music and hope to look more in depth at babies’ physiological responses to happy music.

This article originally appeared in the Conversation, Feb 2017
https://theconversation.com/we-created-a-song-that-makes-babies-happy-72309

12 lessons in happiness you can learn from laughing babies

https://www.instagram.com/p/z2RAcrPdpM/?taken-by=morninggloryville

Morning Gloryville make people all over the world happy with morning raving. I wrote them a guest blog post about happy babies. This is it.

My job is to study baby laughter. (Yes, really!) I want to understand how babies cope with life. Arriving totally unprepared in a completely alien world is overwhelming. If you couldn’t laugh, you’d cry. And true enough babies do cry a lot. But they also laugh far more than we do and this is under-appreciated.

At some level, those laughs are signs of triumph. In a few short years babies teach themselves a huge range of incredible skills. But babies’ laughs and happiness are also about their connections with their loved ones. That’s why I started studying baby laughter and I think there are plenty of lessons there for all of us.

  • Babies wake up happy. I’ve no idea why but they do. Last summer I went to Brazil to work with Pampers. We learned to our surprise that babies almost always start their day in good mood. Since I’ve discovered this I try to start my own day cheerfully, it seems to help. But I probably don’t need tell this to the Morning Glory crew.
  • Babies give everything a go. Eleanor Roosevelt recommended doing one thing every day that scares you. Babies might seem like little scaredy kittens but they’re driven by incredible curiosity. They delight in learning new things. If you are a baby, every new day brings a new skill to master. And each success brings great happiness.
  • Challenge yourself. If you are not a baby, finding new challenges can be more… challenging. But it will be worth it. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied remarkably happy people from all walks of life and discovered that this was their secret.
  • A person’s a person no matter how small. I recently helped Sarah Argent and Polka Theatre make a play about baby science for an audience of babies. We only managed to do this by treating them as little people. Being condescending does not work with babies, so it’s not going to work on anyone bigger.
  • Babies give everyone a chance. A baby can melt any heart. Londoners will all have been there. You are on a bus with an irredeemably grumpy old man But then he starts pulling silly faces at a baby that’s peering at him over mum’s shoulder. That baby accepted him and that’s all it took.
  • Music is magic. I spent the summer in Goldsmiths Infantlab helping Imogen Heap create music scientifically designed to make babies happy. We think we succeeded. Find a baby and play them the Happy Song and see if they agree.
https://www.instagram.com/p/z2RAcrPdpM/?taken-by=morninggloryville
  • Hugs are drugs — A simple hug can make things better. It is doing so at a chemical level. Touch is our first sense to develop and the power of a mother’s touch to regulate stress has deep evolutionary roots.
  • Consent matters — The best way to make a baby laugh is tickling but it’s only works if the baby trusts you and you have the baby’s permission.
  • Connect — After tickles, peekaboo is the other universal game we play with babies. It is all about human connection. You have really tune into the baby to make the game work. And when you do you are rewarded with their delight.
  • Really connect. They are pleased because you took time to interact with them. This lets them learn from you. And you will feel the intensity of their gaze. That is why the best way to make a baby laugh is to take her seriously.
  • Live, love, laugh. Everyone loves babies and babies love everyone. Laughter and happiness are best when shared. We laugh with our friends. The bond between baby and parent is the best friendship there is and that’s why babies and parents laugh more than the rest of us. But everyone can improve their happiness by improving their relationships.
  • Be present — Babies are little zen masters. Babies laugh more than us because they are constantly stopping to look around. They are never in a such a rush to get somewhere else that they miss the magic of right now.When you are happy make the most of it. Enjoy life, you will be glad you did.

Dr Caspar Addyman

Goldsmiths, University of London

For more like this, please look out for my book The Laughing Baby. It is being crowdfunded by Unbound Books. So it needs your support to make it a reality. Please pre-order your copy or tell your friends with babies

International Happiness Day. As our small contribution we thought we’d share some wisdom from the happiest people on the planet, laughing babies.

1. People make us happy

mommy-and-daddy-kissing-baby-small Laughter and happiness are best when shared. We laugh with our friends.  The bond between baby and parent is the best friendship there is and that’s why babies and parents laugh more than the rest of us.  But everyone can improve their happiness by improving their relationships.

2. Challenge yourself every day

Flow_Senia_Maymin If you are a baby, every new day brings a new challenge . And each success brings great happiness. If you are not a baby, finding new challenges can be more… challenging. But it will be worth it. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied remarkably happy people from all walks of life and discovered that this was their secret.

3. Be present

baby-in-shower1 Babies laugh more than us because they are constantly stopping to look around. They are never in a such a rush to get somewhere else that they miss the magic of right now.   As it happens, all three of these make it into  Action for Happiness’s 10 keys to happier living. They also have a special site set up just for today.  There’s lots going on  all over the world. Share your stories on twitter with the hashtag #happinessday.  Finally, I am happy to say, I’m not the only person at Birkbeck studying happiness. David Tross is an associate lecturer in public policy and is studying for a PhD in Community and Happiness studies. Over on the Birkbeck research blog he asks ‘Could greater happiness be a permanent reality?’ Share and Enjoy! Related articles
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OECD PISA Report 2012 Front page graphic.

Jennifer Senior in the New York Magazine

Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the country’s foremost authorities on puberty, thinks there’s a strong case to be made for this idea. “It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he says. “Most adolescents seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze.” Which isn’t to say that most adolescents don’t suffer occasionally, or that some don’t struggle terribly. They do. But they also go through other intense experiences: crushes, flirtations with risk, experiments with personal identity. It’s the parents who are left to absorb these changes and to adjust as their children pull away from them. “It’s when I talk to the parents that I notice something,” says Steinberg. “If you look at the narrative, it’s ‘My teenager who’s driving me crazy.’ ” Link to NYMag article ‘The Collateral Damage of a Teenager’ via MindHacks.com
This is also why the above infograph by BuzzFeed is open to misinterpretation. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="990"]Happy, successful teenagers Countries ranked by school achievement and happiness at aged 15 Created for Buzzfeed by Jake Levy (source)[/caption] It presents  results of The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2012 PISA survey. Scores were collected for 15 year olds in 65 countries. Happiness scores for students who agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I feel happy at school.” Test scores were the combined individual rankings of the students’ math, reading, and science scores.  But this graph exaggerates the differences between countries because it shows scores by ranking not by absolute difference.  If you look at the scores you will see that in even the lowest ranked country (South) Korea 61% of students were happy. [caption id="attachment_36426" align="aligncenter" width="655"]OECD PISA 2012 happiness at school OECD PISA 2012 Percentage of 15 year olds agreeing with question ‘I feel happy at school’[/caption] The differences in combined math,science and literacy scores does more realistically reflect a pronounced difference in performance between countries. But here the important thing to remember is that the really important comparisons are within country rather than between country. Is the country improving it’s own absolute performance and if not what can it learn from those that are. As the PISA report says:
PISA results reveal what is possible in education by showing what students in the highest-performing and most rapidly improving education systems can do 
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The science of happiness

Science of Happiness Infographic Graphic by WebpageFX. Click to embiggen. Infographic – The Science of Happiness  -via Bounce Back: Develop Your Resiliency (PsychCentral.com) A few gentle reminders of the important things in life. Although this graphic is not perfect by any means. In particular, it’s not true that having children makes you less happy. Firstly, the figure they quote 0.24% is so small as to be irrelevant. Secondly, recent studies show the evidence is a lot more mixed than that. What’s more, there are lots of Things Children Can Teach Us About Happiness More importantly, genuine happiness comes from within. Even such hugely challenging &  life changing events as having children, paraplegia or false imprisonment will set only set you back if you let it. Or as Shakespeare said, “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. ”  Sadly, we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy. Next they don’t get the message across that money does not buy happiness. Once basic needs met, additional income makes very little difference to life satisfaction. Shopping and consumerism put you on a ‘hedonic treadmill‘ as you attempt to feed an never ending cycle of desire.   Comparing yourself to others makes you unhappy whether you are broke or a billionaire (because there’s always someone with more than you.)

The 4 most important things you can do to be more happy

1. Exercise. 2. Be thankful. 3. Do things for others. 4. Spend time in nature.
So make those your resolutions and have a happy new year!
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UPDATE: It seems that this infographic was originally created by webpagefx.com. The version on Visual.ly was plagarised by the clearly well dodgy ‘psychology-degree-online.com’.]]>