OBJECTIVE: Referring to the alexithymia construct and Bruch's clinical observations, this study investigated the ability to decode nonverbal signs of emotion in obese boys and girls, and their mothers. METHOD: A group of 10 boys and 11 girls with obesity and their mothers, and a control group were tested. Both mothers and children were asked to recognize a set of 32 brief film sequences interpreted by four actors expressing four emotions (anger, sadness, fear, happiness) with two intensity levels. Each sequence was presented first without sound, second without video, and finally with video and sound. RESULTS: As expected, boys and girls suffering from obesity and their mothers showed a reduced ability to decode visual and verbal signs of emotion compared to the control group. DISCUSSION: This result may be interpreted in accordance with the alexithymia construct, and suggests the importance of developing therapeutic strategies to face alexithymic characteristics in obese children and their mothers.

Background: The relationship between developmental obesity and emotional problems has been particularly studied by Bruch. According to this author, the main reason for early-onset obesity has to be found in the difficulty of some mothers to adequately distinguish between emotional manifestations and the child’s real need for food. In this paper an experiment was carried out in order to test the relationship between developmental obesity and poor ability to recognize facial expressions of some basic emotions. Methods: A group of 20 mothers whose children suffered from serious early-onset obesity (experimental group) and another group of 20 mothers, whose children had slight overweight problems arising long after the first year of life (control group), were tested. Both mothers and their children were asked to recognize a set of facial expressions of emotions. 42 slides of facial expressions of emotions (anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, happiness and neutral faces) were presented to subjects who were asked to mark on an answer sheet the name of the emotion expressed by the actor’s face. Results: A significant difference between the groups was found: a larger number of errors in the recognition of facial expression of emotions was made by mothers and their children in the experimental group. Furthermore a positive linear correlation between the number of errors made by the mothers and that made by their children was present. Conclusions: The findings do support Bruch’s clinical observations. Further studies concerning other emotional signs (either nonverbal or verbal) are needed in order to assess the importance of emotional decoding difficulties in developmental obesity.

Recent investigations have studied the processes of segmentation and perception of the points of tension which occur while listening to tonal and post tonal music. The present study aims to investigate the criteria people use to segment and memorise post tonal pieces.

In this study, two different types of analysis of a piece of post-tonal music (the fifth movement of the String Quartet Op.1 (1959) by G. Kurtág) are compared: an analysis performed by seven professional music analysts using the musical score, and a perceptual analysis carried out by two groups of subjects (18 musicians and 25 non-musicians) while listening in real time. Three possible macroforms proposed by the analysts were compared with those perceived by the listeners. The results show that the macroforms hypothesized by the analysts represented the basic framework for those perceived by the listeners; moreover, the musical competence possessed by the musicians who took part in the listening exercise does not, on the whole, appear to have affected the perception of the macroform of a post-tonal piece of music.

Many factors influence the activation and maturation of the compositional process in children. Although there are numerous studies on children's processes, production and behaviour, little has been done concerning the influence of the didactic strategies used by the teacher: which may actually encourage or suppress such processes.Children are generally asked to create a composition that has a beginning, a middle and end, but we wondered whether it was really necessaryto request this structure or if children of a certain age already adopt it spontaneously, so teachers can use such skills as bUilding blocks for further learning.We investigated if children, without any specific music education, possess a certain ability to use specific types of beginnings and/or endings and how they improve.We asked 132 primary school children, aged 7-10, to perform six improvisations, five with a soprano glockenspiel, and one with tambourine. A total of 792 pieces were recorded and analysed using a specific classification system.After referring to studies on musical theory and semiotics to clarify the concept of beginning and ending in a piece of music, we are presenting the results which show that a certain percentage of children aged 7 already possess the mentioned skills, and that there is a gradual spontaneous acquisition of the beginning/ending conventions. Children improve year by year, with greater progress between 8 and 9 years. THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMThe field of creativity can undoubtedly be considered one of the most important in music education, in Europe as in other countries (Hargreaves and North, 2001). Guilford's "structure of intellect" model (Guilford, 1967) and, even before, his concept of creativity presented to the American Psychological Association in 1950, can be considered a clear landmark for the subsequent studies and research that were to generate many theories based on different approaches (behaviourisric, 157