The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention to increase the production of emotion words in five children with language impairment. Participants were between the ages of 5;11 (years; months) and 11;3 (at the onset of enrollment in treatment) and had been identified with language impairment. Each participant completed between three and six baseline sessions, 20 twenty-minute intervention sessions, and three follow-up sessions. Tasks included story reading, story enactment, and journaling. Each session was recorded and then coded for emotion category (sadness, anger, fear, and surprise), errors made, type of production, and valence agreement. Total emotion word production per category is reported along with percentage of non-overlapping data calculations to determine the effectiveness of treatment for each participant for each emotion word category. Based on percentage of non-overlapping data calculations, treatment was moderately effective for four of the five participants in at least one or more emotion word category. Treatment was mildly effective for all five participants in at least one emotion category. Each participant was observed to make between one and five valence errors throughout the intervention. The errors made by participants often involved the substitution of a simple emotion word category for a more complex emotion word category. Participants were more successful with intervention tasks when provided increased support from the clinician, as seen by most productions being made in response to a question or in response to a cue. While results from this intervention were variable, participants generally made improvements from their participation in this intervention. Utilization of a similar intervention framework with a few alterations based on the limitations observed would be beneficial in future research.

Autism spectrum disorder is often associated with impaired Theory of Mind (ToM), which involves reasoning about others’ mental states. A proposed reason for this impairment is altered brain activity in the temporoparietal junctions (TPJ) in autistic individuals compared to typically developed individuals. This systematic review aimed to investigate ToM in autistic individuals further and its relation to emotion understanding, empathy, and relationships, which were found to possibly be related to ToM and the TPJ. Five studies relevant to the aim were included and most of the results showed associations between ToM and different aspects of emotion understanding, empathy, and relationships. Nonetheless, further research on the topic must be done before these results can be generalized.

Parents teach their children about emotions through a process called emotion socialization and one way that they can do so is through shared discussions about emotions. Research in developmental psychology indicates that parental emotion socialization strategies through discourse such as elaboration and labels and explanations are related to children's emotion understanding and social competence. In the current study, I apply the concept of indirect communication, which has been used in linguistics since the 1970s, to parental emotion socialization with preschool-age children (n= 55; 31 females, 24 males). I define indirect communication as parental speech in which the form and function of a subject-verb phrase do not match and examined relations of parental indirect communication to the previously established strategies in developmental psychology of elaboration and use of labels and explanations. To understand whether this type of communication may influence children's development, I also examined relations of indirect communication to preschoolers' emotion understanding and social competence. Results indicate that parental indirect communication during positive events was related to parental explanations during negative events. Parental indirect communication did not significantly predict children's emotion understanding or social competence, but showed a trend for the association between indirect communication during negative event discussions and children's nonstereotypical emotion understanding. However, the direction for this association was opposite than hypothesized. These results do not suggest consistency of indirect communication across positive and negative event discussions as an emotion socialization strategy. / Master of Science

This study examines associations of emotion language with emotion understanding and emotion regulation during the preschool years. There is evidence that the way parents talk about emotions with their children promotes children's emotion understanding and regulation (e.g. Bird and Reese, 2006; Laible, 2011). However, there has been little attention paid to associations of these outcomes with children's emotion language. In this study, I examined associations of children's emotion language on their emotion understanding and emotion regulation, and tested whether parents' emotion language was indirectly associated with these outcomes through children's emotion language. One hundred fifty-six 3- to 5-year-old children participated with their primary caregiver. Parent-child dyads engaged in an emotion-laden conversation to measure parent and child emotion language. Children also engaged in the locked box task (Cole et al., 2009; Goldsmith et al., 1993) to measure emotion regulation and completed the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (Nowicki and Duke, 1994) to measure emotion understanding. Results differed for younger preschoolers (36 - 53 months) compared with older preschoolers (54 - 69 months) in regard to emotion regulation. For younger preschoolers, path analyses indicated an indirect effect in which parent emotion talk was associated with less attention shifting during the locked box task. There was also a direct effect in which children's greater use of emotion labels was positively associated with emotion understanding. Results may reflect the rapid emotional development occurring during the preschool years and suggest the importance of early emotion socialization. / Ph. D.

The purpose of this study was to better understand associations between acculturation, parental beliefs, mother-child emotion talk, and emotion understanding in Latino preschool-aged children. Research on Latino families may prove to be important given the little research that has focused on emotion understanding strictly in Latino cultures. Forty Latino mother-child dyads were observed throughout a series of naturalistic observations. Mothers self-reported their acculturation and their beliefs about the value and danger of children's emotions, children's emotional development processes, and their role in guiding their children's emotions. Mother-child emotion talk and framing was measured during a 15 minute story-telling task using a Lego house and through a wordless picture book. Children's emotion understanding was measured using two standard tasks. Results showed that mothers' acculturation was related to their beliefs about the danger of emotions, their role in guiding their child's emotions, and their child's readiness to learn about emotions. Mothers' acculturation was also related to children's emotion understanding. Mothers' beliefs about guiding children's emotions were related to mothers' labeling of emotions and to children's emotion understanding. This study confirms and expands several previous findings relating to emotion socialization of children. Overall, results highlight the importance of acculturation for parents' beliefs about emotions and children's emotion understanding. / Master of Science

Several recent studies indicate that children with Language Impairment (LI) have difficulty recognizing and inferring meaning from emotional prosody. The present study is a replication investigating the ability of children with LI to recognize emotion conveyed by prosody in an orally presented narrative passage. Twenty-two children with LI and twenty-two age matched peers ranging from age 7;0 to 10;11 (M= 9.11, SD= 2.54) were selected to participate. Participants listened to recordings of a seven sentence passage read by actors to express happiness, anger, sadness, and fear. The children's task was to identify which emotion the speaker portrayed. Scores obtained from the children with LI as a group were significantly lower than the scores of typically developing children. Differences in the degree of recognition of individual emotions were also apparent; happiness being correctly identified most frequently, followed by anger, sadness, and then fear. Evidence supports the supposition that children with LI struggle to understand emotion conveyed through prosodic cues, which may contribute to the social challenges children with LI experience.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between emotion understanding and language ability to the sociable behavior in children with language impairment (LI) and their typically developing peers. Twenty-nine children with LI and 29 age- and gender-matched peers with typical language were used in this study. Sociability was rated by his/her classroom teacher using the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (Hart & Robinson, 1996). Language ability was assessed using the Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (Carrow-Woolfolk, 1999). To assess emotion understanding, each participant was asked to perform several structural dissemblance tasks. Children with LI received scores significantly lower in language, dissemblance, prosocial behavior, and likeability compared to their typical developing peers. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that language was a significant predictor of sociability. However, further analyses indicated that dissemblance mediated the relationship between language and likeability in girls, but not boys. Results from further analyses for prosocial behavior indicated that dissemblance did not mediate the relationship between language and prosocial behavior. Evidence from this study supports past research indicating children with LI experience emotional and language difficulties, which affect their social competence, particularly in girls.

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between attachment and emotion understanding in preschoolers. Data was collected from 16 preschool children and their mothers recruited from a private learning center in a downtown metropolitan area. Attachment was measured by use of the Attachment Q-sort, 3.0 (Waters, 1995), while emotion understanding was assessed through use of Denham's (1986) affective perspective-taking task and interviews of children concerning naturally occurring emotions and emotion causes (Fabes et al., 1991). Results included a significant correlation (p < .05) between secure attachment and preschooler's ability to decipher the cause of another's emotion; however, a significant correlation was not found between secure attachment and preschooler's perspective-taking ability or ability to name other's emotions. Thus, conclusions about the impact of attachment upon emotion understanding were mixed, and more research on the subject was implicated.

In this study of preschool children and parents (N=64), we examined relations between two facets of parents' emotion socialization: direct and indirect socialization; three facets of children's emotional competence: emotion expression, regulation, and understanding; and their relations with children's social and emotional adjustment. Few associations were observed between indicators of parents' emotion socialization and among indicators of children's emotional competence, suggesting that these constructs are better understood as multi-faceted, rather than unitary processes. Additionally, aspects of children's emotional competence linked--both directly and indirectly--parents' emotion socialization behaviors and children's social and emotional adjustment. Results are discussed with regard to the role of parents' emotion socialization and children's emotional competence, especially emotion regulation, in children's adjustment during preschool.

Children with language impairment (LI) have demonstrated several language problems, including receptive and expressive deficits. A growing body of research has further demonstrated emotion understanding and, more specifically, emotion inferencing deficits that negatively affect the ability of this population to use language successfully in social interactions. Consequently, the present study examines social communication intervention focused on improving emotion inferencing for children with a diagnosis of LI or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as similar social communication deficits are occasionally seen in children with these diagnoses. Study participants were identified from the caseload of a practicing certified speech-language pathologist (SLP) and qualified for intervention based upon Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language (CASL) and Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) scores. Participant ability to perform an emotion inferencing task was then compared pre- and post-treatment with descriptive statistics and presented as 6 individual case studies to determine the effectiveness of social communication intervention. Results are presented pre- and post-intervention and indicated that emotion inferencing capacities for a given scenario increased for some participants, while others demonstrated either modest gains or slight declines in performance after intervention.