Name:Sara Alrefaei, Sharon Manuel

School/Affiliation:Canadian University Dubai

Co-Authors:Papatzikis, E.*; Dimitropoulos, K; Tataropoulou, K.; Pasoudi, E.; Nika, A*

Virtual or In-person:Virtual

Short Bio:

Sara Alrefaei is a Psychology BA student at Canadian University Dubai and holds a PGCert in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health from King’s College London. Her passion lies in the intersection of neuroscience and mental wellbeing.
Sharon Manuel is a BA Psychology student at Canadian University Dubai. With experience in neurocognitive research, clinical and musical training, she aims to advance interdisciplinary approaches to studying brain-behavior relationships.

Abstract:

While research illustrates promising results of music intervention on premature infants’ development, it is limited by narrow facilitator and kinship samples. Elucidating the neurophysiological effects of live singing in this context based on kinship, gender, and voice register (fundamental frequency), could improve prognosis, and outcomes. Filling this gap, a structured protocol of five conditions (silence, sound and lullaby) was delivered by trained facilitators (father, mother, male/female music therapists,). EEG was recorded, preprocessed using an infants custom-made artefact-rejection pipeline, and processed in MATLAB (primary outcome: mean delta spectra power as a development index; secondary outcome: delta spectral entropy). We analyzed the data conducting a Mixed-Effects Model on 14 infants (gestational age ≤ 32 weeks; a priori analysis power effect 0.83) to predict delta band power from Condition and Facilitator (fixed factors; infants: random). Our results showed a significant main effect of Condition but not Facilitator, while compared to maternal sound, the female therapist lowered delta power. The paternal and male therapist sounds showed no reliable differences. However, during the lullaby, paternal singing produced the highest mean delta power, followed by the male therapist, maternal singing, and the female therapist. A Wilcoxon test (V=81, p=.039) confirmed that male voices (low F0) elicited significantly higher delta power than female voices (high F0) with 12% of variance laying between infants (σ²=26 517 µV²). This highlights the unique role of fathers in early neurodevelopment, and potential low-cost structured interventions for premature infants, contributing to improved wellbeing and quality of life.