Music is a powerful tool for conveying mood, whether heard via a live performance or movie soundtrack, making it an effective medium for understanding how people identify and respond to emotions.

Parenting can be hard and can feel especially overwhelming when children have strong emotions, such as anger, frustration or excitement, that they are not always able to regulate on their own.

Today, Marc Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. But he remembers what it was like to be a kid who struggled with his emotions. “I would sometimes just sit ...