Dr Harriet Tenenbaum has a new paper published in the prestigious journal Frontiers in Developmental Psychology examining the relations between parent-child emotion talk and children’s understanding of emotions.
In this research, Dr Tenenbaum and her colleague Ana Aznar of Kingston University, London, recruited Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4-6 year old children. They observed the extent to which they talked about emotions in two storytelling tasks and then returned 6 months later to assess children’s comprehension of emotions.
Findings showed that when mothers talked about emotions more, their children had better emotion understanding six months later. However, father’s talk was not related to children’s emotion understanding. These findings are important in examining emotion talk in a language other than English and with fathers as well as mothers. |
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To read the paper visit http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00670/full
Dr Tenenbaum is co-leader of the School of Psychology’s Enhancing Thinking research theme and editor of the British Journal of Educational Psychology.