Children’s emotion
understanding is central to their development. Emotions allow children to
communicate their likes and dislikes. In addition, children’s emotion
understanding predicts their later academic achievement (Izard, Fine, Schultz,
Mostow, Ackerman, & Youngstrom, 2001) and their peer acceptance and
popularity (Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsky, & Braungart, 1992). For these
reasons, it is very important to understand the development of children’s
emotion understanding and how parents and teachers can contribute to this
understanding.
We will start with an
explanation of children’s emotion understanding and then discuss work we and
others have conducted on parent-child talk about emotions and ways to increase
children’s emotion understanding. Children’s emotion understanding can be
divided into three main components (Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). When
children are between 3 and 5 years, children understand external emotions. What
they mean is that children can recognise simple emotions (e.g., happy, sad)
from faces, understand simple cause and effect (e.g., if
someone’s pet dies, the person will feel sad), and that remembering a previous
experience will call up that emotion (e.g., if you remember when your dog died,
you will feel sad again). The next group of emotions are termed mentalistic
emotions. Children tend to understand these emotions between 5 and 7 years of
age. They include understanding that two people may like different things, that
depending on people’s beliefs they might feel a certain way, and that we can
hide our emotions (e.g., if someone teases you, you can pretend not to let it
bother you). The final group of emotions, reflective emotions, are acquired
between 7 and 9 years of age. These include emotions such as knowing how to
regulate emotions (e.g., thinking about something else as a method of
soothing), ambivalent emotions, and the emotions induced by a moral situation.
All of these different components can be assessed by a measure called the Test
of Emotion Comprehension (Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004). to which we
will refer later on.
Our work has focussed
on looking at how parents talk to children while telling stories. We asked parents and their 4- and 6-year-old children
to tell a story together that involved four different events designed to elicit
emotion: (i) the parents leave their
children to go on an overnight trip, (ii) the child falls down and hurts
himself, (iii) the dog runs away, and (iv) the parents return home. We
then transcribed the conversations and identified instances of emotion talk,
such as happy, sad, etc. We also gave them the Test of Emotion Comprehension
then and again six months later. We found that scores of the test were related
to each other at the two time points. More interestingly, we found that the more
mothers used emotion labels with children, the better children did on the Test
of Emotion Comprehension even after controlling for their performance on the
first administration of the test. Thus, mothers’ talk is related to how well
children understand emotions (Aznar & Tenenbaum, 2013). However, it is difficult
to know if mothers who used more emotion words with their children because
their children were more interested in emotion. For this reason, we conducted
an experimental study where we assigned children to interact with an
experimenter who engaged them in different types of conversations.
The experimental study makes us even more certain that children can learn
emotion from conversations. These children (aged 5 to 8) were given the Test of
Emotion Comprehension. One month later, we returned to read them eight stories
about children who felt either ambivalent or hidden emotions. After reading the
stories, children either 1) were asked to explain why the story character felt
the way s/he did, 2) an experimenter explained the emotion to the child, or 3)
the child was asked questions about the content of the story that were not
related to emotions (e.g., where is the door?). We then re-administered the
Test of Emotion Comprehension. Children who explained and children who were
explained to, learned more about emotions than children who simply answered
stories that were not related to emotion (Tenenbaum, Alfieri, Brooks, &
Dunne, 2008).
What do these findings suggest for parents and teachers? Our studies
suggest that children can learn emotions in everyday conversations. Parents and
teachers should be encouraged discuss emotions with children. The good news is
that whether parents prefer to explain or have the child explain is less
important than simply discussing emotions. Thus, parents can engage children in
these conversations however they wish.
References
Aznar, A., & Tenenbaum, H. R.
(2013). Spanish parent-child emotion talk and their children’s understanding of emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 670. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00670
Cassidy, J., Parke, R.D., Butkovsky, L., & Braungart, J.M. (1992).
Family-peer connections: the roles of emotional expressiveness within the
family and children’s understanding of emotion. Child Development, 63,
603-618.
Izard, C., Fine, S., Schultz, D., Mostow, A., Ackerman, B., &
Youngstrom, E. (2001). Emotion knowledge as a predictor of social behaviour and
academic competence in children at risk. Psychological Science, 12,
18-23.
Pons,
F., Harris, P.L., & de Rosnay, M. (2004). Emotion comprehension between 3
and 11 years: Developmental
periods and hierarchical organizations.
European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1, 127-152.
Tenenbaum, H. R., Alfieri, L., Brooks, P. J., &
Dunne, G. (2008). The effects of explanatory conversations on children's
emotion understanding. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 26,
249-263.
Dr Ana
Aznar is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Surrey. She is
interested in how children learn from everyday interactions with significant
adults in their lives, such as parents, teachers, and peers. She is currently
working on a project lead by Dr Harriet Tenenbaum examining children’s
understanding of peer rejection based on status.
Dr. Harriet Tenenbaum
is a Reader at the University of Surrey. She is interested in children’s
understanding of emotions, science, and discrimination in the context of
important relationships. She is the editor of the British Journal of
Educational Psychology.
