The Feeling Thinking Talking Intervention with Teachers Advances Young Children’s Emotion Knowledge

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Social Cognition

Abstract

Young children in preschool and kindergarten spend many of their waking hours in close contact with their teachers and their peers. Everyday life in these institutions of elementary education and care provides them with numerous opportunities to feel and express emotions, and to observe them in others. Already a rudimentary understanding of how peers and teachers look, sound, and behave when they are angry, sad, fearful, or disgusted makes group life more predictable for them. Because emotion knowledge and language skills are intertwined and both well-known predictors of social and academic success in school, the Feeling Thinking Talking (FTT) intervention was designed that combined linguistically derived language-support strategies – a variant of child-directed speech - with their application to emotion talk and reminiscing during picture-book reading and meals. Preschool and kindergarten teachers were trained for 40 hours.

In order to evaluate the effect of the FTT teacher intervention on children’s emotion knowledge, 110 three- to-five-year-old children from 5 German Kindergarten sites were allocated to the intervention group (IG) or the Business as Usual (BAU) group. 35% were dual language learners (DLL) who spoke at home a different language. Children were tested before the FTT intervention (T1), immediately after the intervention (T2), and about three months later in a follow-up (T3). Children were individually tested on the 7 components of the new Adaptive Test of Emotion Knowledge (ATEM) and with measures of receptive vocabulary (PPVT) and behavioral self-regulation (HTKS).

After a multiple imputation procedure, a multilevel model of children’s emotion knowledge at T1, T2, and T3 was estimated with children’s age, their vocabulary, and their behavioral self-regulation as covariates. As expected, children with a larger vocabulary (beta = 0.445, p < .001) and better behavioral self-regulation (beta = 0.223, p < .01) were more advanced in their emotion knowledge. The interactions between T2 * intervention group (beta = 0.526, p = .08) and T3 * intervention group (beta = 0.561, p = .04) indicate that the IG children’s emotion knowledge increased faster than that of their age-mates in the BAU condition (when all covariates were controlled). The same pattern of results emerged with the components “Situations” and “Mixed Emotions” of the ATEM. There was neither a main effect nor an interaction effect for DLL in the ATEM overall or in any of the components, possibly because DLL effects were suppressed by the covariate vocabulary. Results support the intention of the FTT training to advance children’s emotion knowledge by improving their teachers’ verbal interactions with them. That the increase in young children’s emotion knowledge becomes significant only at T3 suggests that it may take some months of child-directed talking and reminiscing about emotions to increase children’s emotion knowledge beyond that of the BAU condition. These results highlight the advantages of advancing children’s emotion knowledge by means of a teacher-led intervention which makes use of the large number of everyday interactions with them. Discussion focusses on policy implications.

Authors

• Maria von Salisch, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
  Presenting Author

• Katharina Voltmer, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
  Non-Presenting Author