The Components of Young Children's Emotion Knowledge: Which Are Enhanced by Adult Emotion Talk?

Abstract

This research adopted observational and experimental paradigms to investigate the relationships between components of emotion knowledge in three‐ to four‐year‐old children. In Study 1, 88 children were assessed on the Emotion Matching Task (Morgan, Izard, & King), and two tasks requiring the generation of emotion labels and causes. Most tasks were significantly associated with age and language ability, and similar tasks were significantly but moderately correlated. In Study 2, 58 of these children were allocated to one of three conditions: emotion cause talk, in which they received four sessions of training focusing on emotion labels and causes; non‐emotion cause talk, focusing on causal relationships in general; or were allocated to a no‐training control. Children in the emotion causes condition showed improvement in their use of emotion labels but not other components of emotion knowledge. The findings suggest that, in three‐ to four‐year‐old children, emotion knowledge is constituted by related but separable components and that training in emotion language targets separate rather than all aspects of emotion knowledge.

The importance of emotional competence and self-regulation from birth: a case for the evidence-based emotional cognitive social early learning approach

“…For instance, in the older children, emotion knowledge is enhanced when children participate in conversation that encourages their use of emotion language after listening to a story, underscoring that the use of emotion language during causal talk in teaching can enhance emotion knowledge (Gavazzi et al 2011). This approach is supported by evidence that demonstrated, on the one hand, the relation between emotion cause talk by children (or children and their mothers) and emotional understanding on the other (Brown and Dunn 1996;Salmon et al 2013).…”

“…Taken together, then, the results of Brown and Dunn (1996) and Salmon et al (2013) suggest that children's causal talk may have a unique role in the development of emotional competence.…”

“…Specifically, supporting this approach is a study by Salmon et al (2013) that randomly assigned 53 children between the ages of three and four to one of three groups, balanced within-preschools and for gender: (a) emotion cause talk, (b) non-emotion cause talk that focused on general causal relationships, or (c) a no-training control. Results indicated that children in the emotion cause talk condition reported significantly more combined spontaneous emotion labels and causes than the other two groups, using codes for emotional language from an emotion narrative task (Garner et al 1997), although there were not significant between-group differences for some other components of emotion knowledge.…”

“…It has been shown that when parents help children develop particular skills to deal with their emotions, children are more successful in managing and coping with their own emotions and those of others (Gottman 2000). It also has been demonstrated that one important way in which children develop such skills is through adult-child conversations around emotions, known as causal talk (CT; Salmon et al 2013). Causal talk is therefore one important component of ECSEL.…”

“…Causal talk about emotions, referred to in some studies as emotion cause talk (Brown and Dunn 1996;Salmon et al 2013), is commonly broken down into three categories: unelaborated comments about emotions; explanations of the causes and consequences of emotions; and empathy-related statements (Dunn and Brown 1993). ECSEL trains teachers to use all of these opportunities to enhance emotion knowledge, based on the precept that children's emotional competence can be promoted using the current emotional situation as an opportunity to learn more appropriate emotion-regulation strategies (Cole et al 2009).…”