Perspective taking in children's narratives about jealousy

Abstract

This study explored relationships between perspective-taking, emotion understanding, and children's narrative abilities. Younger (23 5-/6-year-olds) and older (24 7-/8-year-olds) children generated fictional narratives, using a wordless picture book, about a frog experiencing jealousy. Children's emotion understanding was assessed through a standardized test of emotion comprehension and their ability to convey the jealousy theme of the story. Perspective-taking ability was assessed with respect to children's use of narrative evaluation (i.e., narrative coherence, mental state language, supplementary evaluative speech, use of subjective language, and placement of emotion expression). Older children scored higher than younger children on emotion comprehension and on understanding the story's complex emotional theme, including the ability to identify a rival. They were more advanced in perspective-taking abilities, and selectively used emotion expressions to highlight story episodes. Subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence were predictive of children's elaboration of the jealousy theme. Use of supplementary evaluative speech, in turn, was predictive of both subjective perspective taking and narrative coherence. © 2010 The British Psychological Society

Cognitive and emotional empathy in typically developing children: The influence of age, gender, and intelligence

“…These results are in line with the majority of behavioural studies on age differences in emotion recognition (Beek & Dubas, 2008b;Golan et al, 2008) and perspective taking (Aldrich et al, 2011;Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011) in typically developing children. There is reason to conclude that older children and adolescents show a superior performance especially in emotion recognition tasks with higher demands, respectively the recognition of secondary emotions and the perspective taking in complex social situations.…”

“…With regard to cognitive and emotional empathy (Decety & Michalska, 2009), age-related changes in the activation of underlying neural structures were found in fMRI studies (van den Bos, van Dijk, Westenberg, Rombouts, & Crone, 2011). Several behavioural studies concentrating on single aspects of cognitive empathy indicated improvement in emotion recognition (Herba, Landau, Russell, Ecker, & Phillips, 2006;Williams et al, 2009) and perspective taking (Aldrich, Tenenbaum, Brooks, Harrison, & Sines, 2011;Bengtsson & Arvidsson, 2011) with age. There is some evidence that beyond early infancy, especially the recognition of complex secondary emotions is influenced by age (Golan, Baron-Cohen, & Golan, 2008).…”

Inferential language use by youth with Down syndrome during narration

“…Narrative storytelling is a functional skill and a means for communicating personal experiences or fictional stories to others, often serving as a forum for reflecting on past events and discussing one’s own and others’ perspectives (Aldrich, Tenenbaum, Brooks, Harrison, & Sines, 2011; Bamberg & Marchman, 1990; Berman, 1995; Trabasso, Stein, Rodkin, Munger, & Baughn, 1992). Thus, narrative storytelling requires the coordination of abilities across the cognitive, linguistic, and social cognitive domains.…”

Telling stories: Gender differences in peers’ emotion talk and communication style

“…The present study examined children's interactions while telling a wordless picture book because of our interest in emotion talk. Past research on emotion talk has used different wordless picture books about a boy's adventures with his pet frog (e.g., Mayer & Mayer, 1975) to elicit emotion talk (e.g., Aldrich, Tenenbaum, Brooks, Harrison, & Sines, in press; Laible & Song, 2006). Research demonstrates that children attribute emotions to story characters in fictional contexts (Bamberg & Damrad‐Frye, 1991; Bamberg & Reilly, 1996; Peterson & Slaughter, 2006; Reilly, 1992), and understand the causes of protagonists’ emotions (Bourg & Stephenson, 1997).…”