Training children in emotion understanding through stories: implications for social cognition

Introduction. The present study deals with children’s ability in social understanding (Hughes, 2011). School-aged children were trained through conversation about brief stories focused on emotional events, in order to improve their understanding about the nature, the causes, and the regulation of emotions. The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of a story-based procedure in improving children’s emotion understanding (EU) and their socio-emotional abilities. It was expected that the training group would outperform the control group in socio-emotional competence abilities such as EU, comprehension of emotional lexicon and empathy. Method. A total of 110 second-grade children (mean age =7 years and 5 months) took part in the study. They were pre- and post-tested with the following measures: the Test of Emotion Comprehension; a false-belief understanding battery; the Emotional Lexicon Test; the How I feel in different situations Test (empathy). Children belonging to the training group took part in a 2-month intervention, in small groups, in twice-weekly training sessions lasting around forty minutes each. During these sessions, after listening to the stories they were involved in 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. 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 (p = .01), as at the post test the training group outperformed significantly the control group. Discussion. The findings suggest that promoting EU through conversational activities on stories has positive effects on children’s social cognition.