How to improve social cognition by training children in emotion understanding : a primary school study

Introduction. The present training-study focuses on the development of emotional understanding (EU) in childhood (Harris, 2008). It examines to what extent improving children's EU has an impact on their social understanding (Hughes, 2011). More precisely, we investigated whether training school-aged children in metacognitive conversational activities (Siegal, 1999) about the nature, the causes and the regulation of emotions played a significant role in improving their EU and their socio-emotional abilities. It was expected that the training group would outperform the control group on the post-test tasks. Method. Participants. A total of 110 primary school children (mean age at the pre-test: 7 years and 3 months; SD = 3,4 months) took part in the study. They were attending the second class and didn’t present any linguistic or psychological deficits. They were evenly divided by gender and randomly assigned to two groups: training group (N = 55) and control group (N = 55). Pre- and post-test measures. Children were pre- and post-tested with the following measures: the Test of Emotion Comprehension (Albanese & Molina, 2008) to assess their comprehension of different aspects of emotions; a false-belief understanding battery, containing two second order tasks (Liverta Sempio et al. 2005), and an adapted version of the Explanation Task (Pesking, & Astington, 2004); the Emotional Lexicon Test (ELT; Grazzani, et al. 2009), to assess their understanding of emotional language; and the How I Feel in different situations Test (HIF; Feshbach, et al. 1991, in the Italian version of Bonino et al. 1998) to evaluate the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy. The intervention. Children belonging to the training group took part in a 2-month intervention. They participated, in small groups, in twice-weekly intervention sessions lasting around 40 minutes each. During these sessions, they were involved in metacognitive conversations about the nature, the external and internal causes, and the regulation strategies of fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and guilt. Results. A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted with the factors Time (pre- vs. post-test) and group condition (training vs. control) as independent variables. Time was a within-subject variable, while Group Condition and Gender were between-subject variables. Scores for EU, false belief comprehension, emotional language comprehension and empathy were the dependent variables. The analysis revealed a significant effect of Time (p < .001), and a significant Time × Group interaction (F = 2,63; p = .02), as at the post test the training group outperformed significantly the control group. The univariate tests showed a significant interaction effect EU (p < .05), false belief comprehension (p < .05) and the cognitive dimension of empathy (p < .05). Discussion. The findings suggest that promoting EU through metacognitive conversational activities has positive effects on children’s social cognition during school years.