Helping Children's Emotional Development
December 18, 2007
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 behavior.
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 labeling 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 behavior, 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 recognize, 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
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