BACKGROUND
In the course of development, children show increased insight and understanding of emotions—both of their own emotions and those of others. However, little is known about the efficacy of training programs aimed at improving children’s understanding of emotion.
OBJECTIVES
To conduct an effect size analysis of trainings aimed at three aspects of emotion understanding: external aspects (i.e., the recognition of emotional expressions, understanding external causes of emotion, understanding the influence of reminders on present emotions); mental aspects (i.e., understanding desire-based emotions, understanding belief-based emotions, understanding hidden emotions); and reflective aspects (i.e., understanding the regulation of an emotion, understanding mixed emotions, understanding moral emotions).
DATA SOURCES
A literature search was conducted using PubMed, PsycInfo, the Cochrane Library, and manual searches.
REVIEW METHODS
The search identified 19 studies or experiments including a total of 749 children with an average age of 86 months (S.D.=30.71) from seven different countries.
RESULTS
Emotion understanding training procedures are effective for improving external (Hedge’s g = 0.62), mental (Hedge’s g = 0.31), and reflective (Hedge’s g = 0.64) aspects of emotion understanding. These effect sizes were robust and generally unrelated to the number and lengths of training sessions, length of the training period, year of publication, and sample type. However, training setting and social setting moderated the effect of emotion understanding training on the understanding of external aspects of emotion. For the length of training session and social setting, we observed significant moderator effects of training on reflective aspects of emotion.
CONCLUSION
Emotion understanding training may be a promising tool for both preventive intervention and the psychotherapeutic process. However, more well-controlled studies are needed.
Objective: Building on recent models of anorexia nervosa (AN) that emphasize the importance of impaired social cognition in the development and maintenance of the disorder, the present study aimed at examining whether women with AN have more difficulties with inferring other people's emotional and non-emotional mental states than healthy women. Results: Women with AN showed poorer emotional mental state inference, whereas non-emotional mental state inference was largely intact. Groups did not differ in undermentalizing (overly simplistic theory of mind) and overmentalizing (overly complex or over-interpretative mental state reasoning).Performance in the MASC was independent of levels of eating disorder psychopathology and symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Discussion:The findings suggest that AN is associated with specific difficulties in emotional mental state inference despite largely intact non-emotional mental state inference. Upon replication in larger samples, these findings advocate a stronger emphasis on socio-emotional processing in AN treatment.
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