Emotion understanding is central to children’s social and cognitive development. Middle childhood (ages 6-12) marks rapid progress in this domain, as children can identify basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear (Denham, 2007) and begin to understand their causes and outcomes. Yet their ability to grasp mixed emotions remains limited. Mixed emotions involve experiencing two or more feelings simultaneously in response to one event—for example, sadness after losing a competition but comfort from receiving encouragement. Research suggests that children begin to process mixed emotions around age 8, with development continuing through ages 10-12 (Harter & Buddin, 1987). Investigating children’s interpretation of mixed emotions between ages 8 and 10 thus offers insight into their emotional cognition.Children often encounter incongruent emotional cues, such as sad images paired with cheerful music or smiling faces with irritated tones. How they integrate such signals reveals their development in emotion understanding and cross-modal processing. Yet most studies examine music or images separately, with limited research on children’s responses to simultaneous incongruent emotions—especially among those aged 8 to 10.This study investigates emotion judgments in 8-10-year-old children using an experimental design with two conditions: (1) unimodal, where children listened to a pretested sad minor-key excerpt; and (2) cross-modal incongruent, where the same music was paired with a happy image. Data included categorical judgments (“sad,” “happy,” or “mixed”) and intensity ratings. Comparing responses across conditions allows assessment of whether children rely more on auditory or visual cues, offering insights into their ability to process mixed emotions.This study extends models of children’s emotion understanding by examining how they process mixed emotions and incongruent cues. It explores whether middle childhood reveals visual dominance or musical contagion, highlighting developmental patterns. Findings also inform emotion and arts education, guiding teachers to design multimodal activities that foster children’s recognition and expression of mixed emotions, supporting social-emotional learning (SEL).Keywords: Mixed Emotions, Incongruent Cues, Children’s Emotion Perception