Times are displayed in (UTC-05:00) Central Time (US & Canada) Change
About this paper symposium
| Panel information |
|---|
| Panel 20. Social Cognition |
| Paper #1 | |
|---|---|
| “I heard he wants a happy face”; Understanding Emotion Words in Linguistically Diverse Preschool Classrooms | |
| Author information | Role |
| Eraine Leland, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Presenting author |
| Anchen Sun, Department of Electrical and Computational Engineering, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Juan Londoño, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Gabriela Gutierrez, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Rebecca Bulotsky Shearer, Ph.D, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Daniel S. Messinger, Ph.D, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Lynn K. Perry, Ph.D, Department of Psychology, University of Miami, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Abstract | |
|
Emotion language in early childhood influences children’s development. Teachers’ labeling and discussion of emotions help preschoolers name and identify their feelings and promotes their language development, which has been linked to children’s social emotional skills. Both language and social emotional skills are principal elements of kindergarten readiness and associated with academic achievement and overall well being throughout childhood. However, to date no work has examined children’s production of emotion language in naturalistic contexts. As such, little is known about the frequency with which preschoolers and their teachers produce emotion words and what emotion words they use. In this project, I will explore the prevalence and types of emotion words used in a linguistically diverse inclusive preschool classroom. Over 600 hours of first-person audio data of children’s (N = 13, mean age = 42 months, 5 Spanish-English bilinguals, 6 children with hearing loss, 2 Spanish-English bilinguals with hearing loss) and teachers’ (N = 3, 2 Spanish-English bilinguals) speech were collected via Sony recorders worn by children during 12 school-day-long observations throughout the 2022-2023 school year. Audio was assigned to speakers (child, teacher) by ALICE and transcribed via Open AI’s Whisper software. Using emotion vocabulary from the Standardized Assessment of Book Reading and social emotion learning material from the Pyramid Model, Spanish and English emotion words throughout the transcript were identified and then lemmatized using the most commonly used form of the word (e.g., love, loves, loved → love). Mixed effect models were used to answer the following questions. 1) What proportion of words produced by children and teachers are emotion words? 2) What emotion words are commonly used by children and teachers in a preschool classroom? Preliminary findings using mixed effect models showed that on average, emotion words made up under 1% of all language spoken in the classroom. Teachers used emotion words more than twice as often as children did. However, teachers produced a lot more language than children, so the proportion of emotion words to total language across all observations was similar for both groups (N = 244, M = 0.007, GMD = 0.004, Range = 0.001 - 0.021). No significant differences in proportion of emotion words directed to or produced by children were found between groups (hearing loss versus typically hearing, bilingual versus monolingual, boys versus girls). Across the year, 50 unique English and 19 unique Spanish emotion words were used. The five most frequently used English emotion words were “happy”, “love”, “merry”, “miss” and “sorry”. The five most commonly used Spanish emotion words were “feliz” (happy), “quiero” (love/want), “amor” (love), “echo” (miss), and “solito” (lonely). Throughout the year, children used a total of 55 unique emotion words, the most common of which were “love”, “happy”, “miss”, “merry”, and “scared”. Teachers used a total 65 unique emotion words, the most common of which were “happy”, “merry”, “love”, “miss”, and “sorry”. Results suggest that emotion words are used infrequently in preschool classrooms, but that teachers and children use a variety of unique emotion words, the most common of which express positive emotions. |
|
| Paper #2 | |
|---|---|
| Supporting Children’s Emotions and Relationships: Influences of Teachers’ Emotion Validating, Acknowledging, and Minimizing Language | |
| Author information | Role |
| Dr. Elizabeth K. King, Ph.D., School of Teaching, Learning, and Developmental Science, Missouri State University, United States | Presenting author |
| Abstract | |
|
In a unidimensional model of emotion-focused teaching in early childhood, Zinsser et al. (2023) posit there are three overarching teaching practices facilitative of children’s social-emotional development: emotion modeling, responding, and instructing. One specific emotion-focused teaching practice, termed emotion language, encapsulates emotion modeling, responding, and instruction through the verbalization of emotion states within teacher–child interactions, and facilitates children’s emotion understanding in social contexts (Denham, 2005; King, 2020). This study offers a new categorization of early childhood teachers’ emotion language, describing three types of emotion language: emotion validating (respectful, understanding verbal discussion of emotions in context), emotion acknowledging (verbally naming a feeling without supportive/unsupportive language), and emotion minimizing language (verbal dismissal and/or discouragement of emotion). This work explores differential use of emotion language types and assesses the relationships among each type and children’s social emotional competence and teacher–child relationships concurrently and across time. Research questions include: 1) What is the comparative frequency of teachers’ use of emotion validating, acknowledging, and minimizing language? 2) Does teachers’ emotion language (three types) relate to children’s social emotional competence concurrently and/or across time? and 3) Does teachers’ emotion language (three types) relate to teacher–child relationships concurrently and/or across time? Although research has found teachers’ emotion language relates to children’s social-emotional competence, the role of emotion language in teacher–child relationships has yet to be explored. Moreover, the differential influence of types of teachers’ emotion language across time requires explication. This study hypothesized that teachers’ emotion validating and acknowledging language would be positively related to children’s social-emotional competence and closeness in teacher–child interactions concurrently and across time, while emotion minimizing language would be negatively associated with children’s social emotional competence and positively associated with conflict in teacher–child interactions concurrently and across time. In a sample of 96 toddlers and preschoolers and their 17 teachers, teachers’ emotion language, children’s social emotional competence, and teacher–child relationships were assessed at two time points across one academic year. Teachers’ emotion language was captured via line-by-line coding of two hours of video-recorded teacher–child interactions during free play (two 30-minute observations on separate days in fall and two 30-minute observations on separate days in spring). Children’s social emotional competence and teacher–child relationships were assessed via teacher report in fall and spring. Regarding the first research question, pairwise comparisons indicate that teachers most often used emotion acknowledging language at both time points. Though use of emotion validating and minimizing language were not significantly different from one another, teachers used more validating than minimizing in fall, yet more minimizing than validating in spring. Using multi-level models to explore research questions two and three, findings indicate teachers’ emotion minimizing language concurrently relates to less adaptive social-emotional behaviors in children. Additionally, teachers’ emotion acknowledging language concurrently relates to more closeness in teacher–child relationships; this finding holds across time with fall emotion acknowledging language predicting closer spring teacher–child relationships. Findings inform the study and implementation of emotion language supportive of children’s social-emotional development and teacher–child relationships. |
|
| Paper #3 | |
|---|---|
| Emotion Word Knowledge is Associated with Adaptive Emotion Regulation: Links to Family-level and Child-level Factors | |
| Author information | Role |
| Michelle Shipkova, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States | Presenting author |
| Helen M. Milojevich, Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke University, Durham, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Kristen A. Lindquist, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Margaret A. Sheridan, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Abstract | |
| Emotion understanding and emotion regulation play important roles in children’s development, but we have only a limited understanding of how these constructs are socialized. Constructionist theories suggest that as children engage in interactions with caregivers, they learn to associate words naming emotion categories with conceptual representations of specific emotions, leading to greater emotion understanding. In this preregistered study, we operationalized emotion word knowledge as a key feature of emotion understanding. Our sample consisted of 252 mainly low socioeconomic status (SES), majority non-White children (aged 4-8 years; 49.21% female) and their caregivers. We assessed emotion word knowledge with a performance-based measure in which children were asked to generate definitions for words representing a wide range of emotion categories in the format of a semi-structured interview, allowing experimenters to fully probe children’s understandings of emotion words (Nook et al., 2020). Using structural equation modeling, we examined indirect effects of implicit parental emotion socialization (i.e., parent-reported difficulties with emotion regulation and emotional expressivity) on children’s emotion regulation (i.e., parent reports of their emotional lability/dysregulation and adaptive emotion regulation) through children’s emotion word knowledge (see Figure 1). While implicit parental emotion socialization behaviors were unrelated to children’s emotion word knowledge, child emotion word knowledge predicted parent reports of children’s adaptive emotion regulation (β = 0.162, p = .032), aligning with constructionist theories which postulate a causal role of language in the development of how children understand emotion categories which is then used for successful emotion regulation (Hoemann et al., 2019; Shablack & Lindquist, 2019). In addition, we observed an indirect effect of children’s verbal intelligence on adaptive emotion regulation through children’s emotion word knowledge (β = 0.163, p = .036), consistent with evidence that increased emotion understanding is in general related to adaptive emotional outcomes above the influence of verbal ability (Di Maggio et al., 2016; Morgan et al., 2009). In contrast, we observed a direct effect of parental difficulties with emotion regulation on children’s dysregulation (β = 0.416, p < .001). More frequent positive (β = 0.439, p < .001) and less frequent negative submissive (β = -0.223, p = .026) emotional expressivity in the family predicted more adaptive emotion regulation in children. Family SES predicted children’s emotion word knowledge (β = 0.195, p = .002). Lastly, in line with literature indicating that parents engage in more and more elaborated emotion-focused conversations with daughters compared to sons (Fivush et al., 2000; Aznar & Tenenbaum, 2020), emotion word knowledge was more advanced in girls compared to boys, though there was no evidence of moderation of other observed associations by child sex. An alternative model, where indices of children’s emotion regulation predicted emotion word knowledge, rather than the other way around did not provide adequate fit of the data. These findings are the first to provide empirical support for the role of emotion word knowledge in the development of adaptive emotion regulation in young children and begin to shine light on how family contexts might support children’s development of emotion word knowledge. | |
| Paper #4 | |
|---|---|
| Caregiver speech predicts the emergence of children’s emotion vocabulary | |
| Author information | Role |
| Mira Nencheva, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, United States | Presenting author |
| Diana I. Tamir, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Casey Lew-Williams, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, United States | Non-presenting author |
| Abstract | |
|
Learning about emotions is an important part of children’s social and communicative development. How do children learn that the label “happy” represents a positive emotion and “sad” - a negative emotion? We hypothesized that caregivers build important semantic connections between emotion labels and other positive or negative words (e.g., “smile”, “break”) in their language input, and in doing so, shape their child’s own production of emotion words. We predicted that when caregivers produce an emotion label, they would embed it within sentences that include other similarly valenced (i.e., positive or negative) words, such that emotion labels and valenced words co-occur in time. We analyzed caregiver-child interactions (16-30 months) from 2,936 CHILDES transcripts in English, containing over one million caregiver utterances. We conducted preliminary analyses with a small set of emotion labels (8), and a preregistered replication with an expanded set of mental state labels (94). Caregivers used more positive words closer to a positive emotion label (8 labels: 𝛽=-0.1, t(65,008.5)=-21.28, p<0.001; 94 labels: 𝛽=-0.01, t(112,403.1)=-3.55, p<0.001), and more negative words closer to a negative emotion label (small set: 𝛽=0.07, t(87,835.01)=17.4, p<0.001; expanded set: 𝛽=0.05, t(58,092.69)=9.5, p<0.001; Figure 1). For example, ten utterances away from a positive emotion label (e.g., “happy”), parents’ utterances were relatively neutral (“What’s he doing?”). But the utterances closer the label became increasingly positive (“Because I wanna get him dancing ya know!” [3 utterances away], “Can I have a big kiss?” [1 utterance away]). These converging results suggest that caregivers provide valenced context in the utterances preceding and following emotion labels. Do children leverage the surrounding positive and negative words to learn the valence of emotion labels? In a subset of dyads that had longitudinal data (N=35), we tested whether caregivers who surround emotion labels with more valenced contexts have children who later produce emotion labels with higher accuracy in appropriately valenced contexts. In the first half of each dyad’s data, we quantified the valenced context surrounding emotion labels provided by caregivers, and in the second half, the valenced context in which the child embedded their own productions of emotion labels (Figure 2a). Both were measured as the degree to which the valence of the speaker’s utterances surrounding an emotion label matched the valence of the label. The more scaffolding a parent provided, the better their child was at producing emotion labels in the appropriate context (8 labels 𝛽=0.35, t(31)=2.18, p=0.037; 87 labels: 𝛽=0.4, t(24)=2.36, p=0.027; Figure 2b), controlling for age, lexical development, and emotion language. The quality of caregiver cues to valence predicts children’s own successful production of emotion labels. This investigation provides a new technique for defining the ‘quality’ of infant-directed speech through complex patterns of words and contexts to trace the emergence of emotion words. Our approach will enable other researchers to quantify how caregivers dynamically select words that help children move from producing concrete nouns to constructing complex, abstract meanings. |
|
⇦ Back to session
“Tell me how you feel”: Children’s Emotion Vocabulary and Caregiver Scaffolding of Social Emotional Skills
Submission Type
Paper Symposium
Description
| Session Title | “Tell me how you feel”: Children’s Emotion Vocabulary and Caregiver Scaffolding of Social Emotional Skills |