Promoting children’s social cognition through story-based conversation: An intervention study

This study investigates the impact of a story-based conversational procedure on children’s theory of mind (ToM) and emotion understanding (EU), two basic components of social cognition (Hughes, 2011), related to children’s successful social interactions and learning processes. 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 (Pons, Harris 2000); a false-belief understanding battery (Astington, 1998); the Emotional Lexicon Test (Grazzani et al., 2009); the How I feel in different situations Test (Feshbach et al., 1998). The training group took part, twice a week and for two months, in sessions lasting about forty minutes. During these sessions, held in small groups, participants listened to stories consisting in brief illustrated scenarios of emotional scripts familiar to children. Then, they took part in conversations about the nature, the external and internal causes, and the regulation strategies of emotions (Siegal, 1999). In parallel, the control group was engaged in their usual lessons. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance on scores of emotion understanding, false-belief comprehension, emotional language comprehension and empathy as dependent variables, revealed a significant effect of Time (F=6.97; p<.001), and a significant Time × Group interaction (F = 2.63; p = .02. At the post-test, the training group performed significantly better than the control group on most components of EU, on second-order false-belief, and on empathy. These findings suggest that training children in story-based conversational activities focused on emotional understanding, has positive effects on their overall social cognition.