Emotion comprehension and attachment: A conversational intervention with school-aged children

Introduction: As part of the flourishing line of enquiry into children's emotion understanding, wereport the results of a conversation-based intervention study aimed at improving participants' emotioncomprehension, and exploring the intervention effect as a function of attachment security. Method: The study was conducted at school with the participation of 98 second-grade children (meanage: 7 years, 7 months; SD: 3.4 months). Participants were assigned to experimental and control groupsthat were balanced with respect to attachment security and insecurity as evaluated using the SeparationAnxiety Test (SAT). The experimental group was exposed to a conversational intervention, in whichshort story readings with emotional content were used to stimulate discussion on the nature, causes andregulation of emotion. The children in the control group listened to the same stories, but did not takepart in the conversational activity. Children from both groups were individually pre- and post-tested onmeasures of emotional lexicon (ELT) and emotion comprehension (TEC). Results: The training was found to have a significant effect on the emotion comprehension of the childrenallocated to the experimental group. In addition, non-secure children displayed higher gains in emotioncomprehension than secure participants. The implications of the findings for educational and schoolcontexts are discussed.