Toddlers’ Emotion Vocalizations During Peer Conflicts Elicit Contingent Teacher Interventions in Early Childhood Settings

• In Event: Young Children's Emotion Expression and Understanding

Abstract

Toddlers have much exposure to peers as most children under age three experience some type of non-parental childcare (Deynoot-Schaub & Riksen-Walraven, 2006). However, their interactions with peers during the first three years are less emotionally regulated (Barthel et al., 2018) and more conflictual (Clarke et al., 2019) than those in later childhood. Peer conflicts provide opportunities for emotion socialization wherein adults guide toddlers to express their emotions appropriately (Kvist & Cekaite, 2021). This highlights the important role of teachers in facilitating emotion regulation abilities in childcare settings (Clarke et al., 2019). Yet it is unknown how toddlers’ emotions elicit teachers’ responses in childcare. This study examined toddlers’ emotions during peer conflicts and teachers’ interventions. We hypothesized that teachers would intervene when toddlers’ emotions were expressed vocally.

Seventy-seven toddlers between 12 to 36-month-old were observed for 30 minutes during free choice play. The setting was a large indoor room in four university-affiliated child development programs in two southern and one western city that mostly serve children from White middle class families (60% girls; 76% European American and 20% African American). Using ELAN coding software trained coders first identified peer conflicts before coding toddlers’ vocalizations, emotions (i.e., anger and sadness based on a previous reliable coding scheme; Arsenio & Lover, 1997), and aggression, as well as teachers’ interventions. Timestamps of each event were then exported into an excel file to determine contingencies (events occurring within 5 seconds of each other). Of particular interest was how toddlers’ vocalizations, emotions, and aggression elicited contingent teacher interventions.

On average, toddlers engaged in 2.5 conflicts per 30-minute observation (Range = 0 to 10). Most conflicts were from toy possession disputes (61%), less occurred from space intrusion (28%), and other disputes (11%). Victims of conflicts responded vocally to most disputes (68%) and emotionally half the time – anger (23%) and sadness (25%). Aggression was present in sixty percent of conflicts. Teachers typically intervened with verbal interventions (59%) and less often with physical interventions (23%), while remaining conflicts were settled by peers (18%).

Logistic regression examined toddlers’ vocalizations, emotions, aggression, and an Emotion x Vocalizations interaction term with teacher interventions. The interaction of Emotions x Vocalizations significantly predicted teacher interventions, b = 2.44, p = .01, but toddlers’ vocalizations, p = .28, emotions, p = .35, and aggression, p = .65, did not have significant main effects (Table 1). This indicates that toddlers’ emotion vocalizations predicted contingent teacher interventions over their aggression, vocalizations, and emotions alone. Odds ratios were utilized to further examine the association of toddlers’ emotion vocalizations with teacher interventions. Findings indicated that toddlers’ anger (OR = 2.42, 95% CI [0.989, 5.933]) and sadness (OR = 8.07, 95% CI [2.743, 23.786]) vocalizations, but not non-emotion vocalizations (OR = 0.77), significantly increased the odds of eliciting a teacher intervention during a conflict (Figure 1). This demonstrates that toddlers’ emotion vocalizations play an important role in initiating teacher interventions in early childhood settings. Implications for the development of toddlers’ emotion regulation and conflict resolution skills will be discussed.

Authors

• Lukas D Lopez, University of Utah
  Presenting Author

• Kyong-Ah Kwon, University of Oklahoma

• Hyun-Joo Jeon, University of Nevada, Reno

• Courtney Beers Dewhirst, University of Oklahoma

• Sun Geun Kim, University of Oklahoma

• Francisca Martinez Jensen, The University of Oklahoma