Emotional Congruence in Childhood: The Influence of Music and Color on Cognitive Processing

Emotions are known to influence cognitive processes, yet the nature of this influence remains debated, particularly during childhood. According to the emotional congruence model, information congruent with an individual’s affective state is processed more efficiently than incongruent information. While this effect has been widely studied in adults, evidence in children is still limited. The present research investigates the influence of emotional congruence on selective attention in typically developing children from preschool to fifth grade, using a dual emotional induction paradigm based on music and color. In Study 1, classical music excerpts were used to induce pleasant or unpleasant emotional states and to validate the effectiveness of musical induction across age groups. In Study 2, this musical induction was combined with emotionally valenced color cues (yellow vs. gray) embedded in a visual search task to examine their impact on attentional performance. Results from Study 1 confirmed that music effectively modulated children’s emotional valence, although this effect was weaker in younger participants. In Study 2, attentional performance improved significantly when the task was presented on a yellow background, regardless of the valence of the previously induced musical emotion. No robust emotional congruence effect between music and color was observed, although performance was highest in the joyful music–yellow color condition. Overall, these findings suggest that perceptual emotional cues embedded in the task context, particularly positive color cues, exert a stronger and more persistent influence on children’s selective attention than transient affective states induced by music. This study contributes to developmental models of emotion–cognition interaction by highlighting asymmetrical valence effects and the predominant role of perceptual emotional signals in childhood attention.