About this session

Saturday, 12:10 PM - 1:40 PM

“Tell me how you feel”: Children’s Emotion Vocabulary and Caregiver Scaffolding of Social Emotional Skills

Recognizing and regulating emotions is integral to child development. Caregiver’s labeling and discussion of emotions, as well as their modeling of emotion regulation, is proposed to scaffold young children’s emotion knowledge and vocabulary which are principal components of kindergarten readiness and associated with childhood wellbeing. This symposium includes four talks discussing children and caregivers’ (i.e. caregivers and teachers) use of emotion words, how emotion vocabulary develops, and how it relates to children’s emotion knowledge. As such, it will attract a broad array of attendees including those interested in language, social emotional competences, and caregivers’ and teachers’ scaffolding of these skills.

The first talk uses automated speech recognition to characterize the use of emotion words in preschool classrooms; emotion words comprised less than 1% of all words spoken in the classrooms, and the emotion words most frequently used by teachers and children tended to convey positive emotions.

The second talk presents research on teachers’ use of emotion validating, acknowledging, and minimizing in a toddler classroom, finding that minimizing was related to children’s less-adaptive emotion competencies, while acknowledging was associated with better teacher-child relationships.

The third talk examines whether caregivers' emotion socialization related to children’s emotion regulation through children’s emotion knowledge, finding that caregivers’ positive emotional expressivity and children’s emotion word knowledge had direct effects on emotion regulation.

The final talk focuses on caregivers’ scaffolding of children’s emotion vocabulary acquisition via embedding emotion words within similarly valenced utterances, which in turn predicted children’s successful production of emotion words in appropriate contexts.

Paper #1
Title	“I heard he wants a happy face”; Understanding Emotion Words in Linguistically Diverse Preschool Classrooms
Presenting author	Eraine Leland, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States

Paper #2
Title	Supporting Children’s Emotions and Relationships: Influences of Teachers’ Emotion Validating, Acknowledging, and Minimizing Language
Presenting author	Dr. Elizabeth K. King, Ph.D., School of Teaching, Learning, and Developmental Science, Missouri State University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Emotion Word Knowledge is Associated with Adaptive Emotion Regulation: Links to Family-level and Child-level Factors
Presenting author	Michelle Shipkova, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States

Paper #4
Title	Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children’s emotion vocabulary
Presenting author	Mira Nencheva, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Eraine Leland, University of Miami, United States

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