Poster #59 - Preschool-aged Children's Performance and Emergent Response Themes in Self-Regulatory and Empathetic Contexts

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

In this study, we use an open-ended social-emotional interview task to examine how children in a diverse urban public school district respond over the course of the pre-K year when prompted for self-regulatory and empathetic coping strategies for difficult emotions. We recorded and qualitatively coded the responses of approximately 600 preschool-aged children to an open verbal prompt regarding coping mechanisms for dealing with their own difficult emotions and the difficult emotions of similar-aged peers. Responses were coded for accurate emotion identification, helpfulness, and thematic elements of the provided strategy (e.g. parent involvement, breathing, and affection), as well as agency (the personal involvement of the child in their proposed strategy for another child). Here, we probe the prevalence and variability of these key variables and examine common thematic threads across the demographic factors of child gender, age (as measured during Fall of the pre-K year), and ethnicity (comparing AAPI and Latinx children, the two most common racial-ethnic demographics in our sample). We find that age is significantly associated with children’s ability to produce adaptive self-regulatory responses and helpful empathetic responses to sadness and anger. At both Fall and Spring, aged-4 children are better able to produce helpful coping strategies, and produce these strategies in greater numbers, relative to their aged-3 peers. At Fall, aged-4 children are also better able to identify sadness and anger. In examining response themes, we find that aged-4 children are significantly more likely to mention breathing as a self-regulation strategy relative to their aged-3 peers. Regarding gender, we find that girls produce more agentic responses to anger at Fall and Spring relative to boys, but no gender differences in responses to sadness at either time point. Finally, regarding racial-ethnic differences, we find that Latinx students are more likely than their AAPI peers to produce agentic responses to the sad emotions of others in the Fall. We find that emotion identification and adaptive responses improve from fall to spring across all preschool children in our sample. Our findings suggest that the ability to identify emotions as well as cope with difficult emotions improve significantly over the preschool year, and that open-ended interviews such as the one employed for this study are useful and novel tools for understanding how children understand and respond to their own emotions and the emotions of others. Future directions for this work include extending thematic coding into the Spring in order to examine thematic shifts in children’s self-regulatory and empathetic responses from Fall to Spring.

Authors

• Catie Connolly, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University