Helping Children's Emotional Development

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 18 Dec 2007 - 2:00 PST

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Psychologists can help parents to expand their children's emotional vocabulary through a technique called 'Emotion-rich Reminiscing' (ER), with important results for those children's later emotional literacy and behaviour.

This is the finding presented on Thursday 13 December 2007, to the Annual Conference of the Division of Clinical Psychology at the Congress Centre, London, by Dr Karen Salmon from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Dr Salmon and colleagues from the University of New South Wales conducted two studies with the parents of preschool children. The first study involved 41 typically developing children; the second involved 26 children who had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD).

In both studies the children and parents were divided into two groups. In one group, the parents were encouraged to play with their children, allowing the child to lead, and in the second group, the parents were trained to use ER. In ER parents are encouraged to discuss past events using questions, providing the child with detail and labelling and identifying the cases of emotion.

The researchers found that parents who had been trained to use ER had changed the style and content of their conversations with their children, and that the children also changed their style and content with their parents.

In the study with typically developing children, who were followed up for six months, those children had also improved their understanding of aspects of emotion. In the second study, with children who met criteria for ODD, findings showed that training in ER could be added to parent management training, the most effective treatment for altering oppositional behaviour, without altering the effectiveness of either intervention.

Dr Salmon says: 'These findings are important because parent-child conversation in the early years shapes how children learn to recognise, predict and understand emotion in themselves and in other people. Acquiring this knowledge is an important part of learning to behave in a cooperative way.'

The British Psychological Society