Research has shown that musical engagement promotes prosocial behavior in preschool-aged children under some conditions but not others. The current study tested whether an active musical interaction between a preschooler (M_age: 56 months), an experimenter, and a research assistant would result in more sharing and helping behavior than a matched, non-musical interaction, while examining the extent to which a naturalistic musical interaction actually produced interpersonal movement synchrony. Verbal content was also manipulated (didactic/neutral). The results showed that musical play was associated with more spontaneous helping and overall sharing than non-musical play. Analysis of synchrony and joint movement within the experimental interaction showed that musical play resulted in significantly more joint movement and interpersonal synchrony than non-musical play, but that even in musical conditions, joint movement was only synchronized for a fraction of the length of the interaction. There was no evidence of an effect of verbal content on children’s behavior, despite uniformly high retention for the content of the song or poem across conditions. These findings provide further evidence that music making can facilitate prosocial behavior in preschoolers, regardless of lyrical content, and that joint movement may play a more significant role than precise movement synchrony in preschoolers’ musical engagement.

研究表明，在某些情况下，音乐参与会促进学龄前儿童的亲社会行为，而在其他情况下则不会。当前的研究测试了学龄前儿童（M_年龄）之间是否存在积极的音乐互动：56个月），同时要研究自然主义音乐互动在多大程度上真正产生了人与人之间的运动同步性，实验者和研究助手会比匹配的非音乐互动带来更多的共享和帮助行为。言语内容也得到了操纵（指示/中立）。结果表明，音乐演奏比非音乐演奏具有更多的自发帮助和整体共享。在实验性互动中对同步性和关节运动的分析表明，音乐演奏比非音乐性演奏产生的关节运动和人际同步性明显更多，但是即使在音乐条件下，关节运动也只能在互动时间的一小部分进行同步。没有证据表明言语内容对儿童的行为有影响，尽管在不同情况下对歌曲或诗歌的内容保持一致的保留。这些发现提供了进一步的证据，表明音乐创作可以促进学龄前儿童的亲社会行为，无论其抒情内容如何，​​并且联合运动在学龄前儿童的音乐交往中可能比精确的运动同步起更重要的作用。