Children with language impairment (LI) often demonstrate difficulties in social communication. Although a number of general social communication interventions have been suggested, there is relatively little work done to examine the efficacy of these interventions for school-age children with LI, and none reported to target general emotional competence. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on teacher perception of an intervention designed to improve emotion understanding. The intervention was centered on the presentation and use of children's stories to introduce and practice aspects of emotion understanding. The withdrawn and sociable subscales of the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS) were selected as variables on which to measure teacher perception. Following treatment five of the six participants scored higher ratings of prosocial behavior, with two demonstrating overall reductions in withdrawn behavior and increases in sociable behavior. For one of these participants, the reported progress was notable. The most positive indicator of change following treatment was the reduction in solitary-active withdrawal behavior reported for three of the participants. A reduction in this type of behavior would most likely have an important impact on the quality of social interactions experienced by these individuals.

Recent research indicates that many children with Language Impairment (LI) have difficulty with social communication skills. This study assessed the impact of a social communication intervention on teacher perceptions of social withdrawal in children who received the treatment. The intervention targeted emotion understanding using the presentation of children's stories, facial picture cards, and journaling. Teacher perception was measured using the three withdrawal subscales of the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS): Solitary-Active withdrawal, Solitary-Passive withdrawal, and Reticence. Following treatment all five participants received lower ratings of withdrawn behavior on some of the subscales. Only one participant received a rating indicting increased withdrawn behavior (on a single subscale). The most positive indicators of change following treatment were the reduction in Solitary-Active withdrawal for three of the participants and the reduction of Reticent withdrawal for three participants. This study reveals promising results for social communication intervention in children with LI in the area of withdrawn behaviors.

Adults perceive basic emotional facial expressions as discrete categories using categorical perception. Within categorical perception, discrimination of facial emotional expressions is better for between category faces than within category faces. In this thesis, I examined the developmental trajectory of categorical perception in early childhood. I also examined the relationship between sensitivity to physical differences in facial emotional expressions and the use of emotion labels in toddlers. In Chapter 2, I found that infants before 12-months failed to discriminate between category faces along a happy-sad continuum. In contrast, evidence suggest that 9- and 12-month old infants categorically perceived faces along a happy-angry continuum. These findings suggest that categorical perception may not develop concurrently for all emotions. In Chapter 3, I found that toddlers by 26-months of age categorically perceived faces along a happy-sad continuum. These results highlight the long developmental trajectory of categorical perception of facial emotional expressions across early childhood. In Chapter 4, I found a relationship between perceptual sensitivity to physical differences between happy and sad faces, and the emotion vocabulary size in 26-month-olds. This relationship suggests that learning about emotions may utilize information from multiple domains, and that learning in one domain may influence the development of another. The perception of facial emotional expressions is an essential component of early social emotional development. Categorical perception is a mechanism that aids in organizing complex social information from faces into actionable categories. The research in this thesis advances our understanding of early social perceptual development and the process that allow us to successfully navigate in the social world. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Humans are experts at reading faces. Specifically, they are capable of interpreting complex social information from faces, including emotions, and using this information to navigate social situations. In order to organize facial emotional information, humans use a mechanism called categorical perception to quickly and efficiently sort facial emotional information into discrete categories. Inferences can be made about members within a category, which aids in the prediction and production appropriate behaviours. However, there has been limited research into the development of categorical perception in early childhood. The key goal of this thesis was to develop infant and toddler appropriate methodologies that capture the development categorical perception. In this thesis, I found that categorical perception does not develop uniformly across all ages and between different emotions. Results suggest that perceptual sensitivity to differences in facial emotional expression may be influenced by the use of emotion labels, or vice versa.

Many school-age children with language impairment (LI) have difficulties with aspects of social and emotional learning. This study was structured to evaluate one aspect of the effectiveness of a social communication intervention, the appropriate production of emotion words. Four school-aged children with LI participated in 20 sessions of story-based intervention targeting understanding and usage of emotion-based words. Emotions targeted included the emotion word categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Because the knowledge of the emotion word categories varied from child to child, each child had different target words. The percentage of correct production of targeted emotion word categories was tracked, recorded and presented in figure format. The percentage of correct productions provided an estimation of the participants' usage and understanding of emotion-based words from session to session. Percentage of nonoverlapping data (PND) for each participant (subdivided by emotion) was calculated where appropriate as one measure of the effectiveness of the intervention. Although somewhat variable, the data showed that the children did make progress in their use of some of the emotion word categories that they did not understand at baseline. The results of the study present some promising preliminary findings.

Children diagnosed with Language Impairment (LI) often have difficulty with aspects of social communication. This thesis evaluates the effects of a social communication intervention focused on facilitating the correct production of emotion words in four elementary school-aged children with LI. Researchers monitored changes from pretreatment baseline data, through the intervention, and ended with posttreatment follow-up data for the emotions happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Based on baseline measures, emotion categories in which the child showed limited proficiency were targeted for the 20 intervention sessions. The emotions targeted were different for each child. Each intervention session contained a combination of storybook therapeutic strategies such as story enactment, story sharing, and modeling by the clinician to help increase the child's emotion understanding. The child participated in emotion recognition and emotion inferencing tasks. The data for each participant was analyzed individually and formatted into figures. Data analyzation was performed using percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) which provided insight into how successful the intervention was for each of the targeted emotions. The results of each child's emotion based words were varied, some participants making good progress and others showing little or no gains. These results suggest that the intervention was effective for some of the children and should continued to be refined.

Many investigators have documented that lack of emotional intelligence (EI) in professional nursing correlates with patient dissatisfaction, negative patient outcomes, and litigation. However, much less information is available to nurse educators for an effective instructional strategy to increase EI skills, specifically emotion understanding and management (the most influential branches of EI) in nursing students. Grounded in the theory of EI and the theory of simulation, the purpose of this quantitative quasi experimental study was to introduce educational technology as a useful strategy for influencing EI in a convenience sample of 88 second semester students in a baccalaureate program. Research questions for the study examined the treatment (human patient simulators, stressful situational scenarios, and role playing) for changing EI skill levels. Repeated measures, within factors analysis of variance was used to test for a relationship between the variables at three time periods during a semester. Key results for emotion understanding were significant with small effect, F(1.973, 171.686) = 7.526, p = .001, partial ω2 = .047. Key findings for emotion management were significant with medium effect, F(1.827, 158.965) = 9.981, p < .0005, ω2 = .063. However, conclusions were mixed for influence, as the instructional strategy resulted in negative EI learning (consistent decreased gain) for most participants. By weeding out irrelevancies, this study contributes to current nursing research and informs nursing educators of the need to continue the search for an effective strategy for teaching emotion understanding and management skills in nursing curricula.

Many school-age children with a diagnosis of Language Impairment (LI) also have social communication difficulties. Some of these difficulties are related to deficits in emotion understanding. This thesis evaluates the effects of a social communication intervention designed to increase the production of emotion-based words as an indicator of emotional competence. For five elementary school-aged children with LI, the production of emotion-based words was analyzed by first determining the frequency of words produced in preintervention sessions for the following categories: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. Following these measures, the participants received 20 intervention sessions over the course of treatment. Treatment involved the use of narratives to address emotion recognition and inferencing abilities. Individual analyses for each participant, including percent of nonoverlapping data (PND), were conducted for each participant in the categories of anger, fear, and surprise, to determine the effects on the production of emotion-based words during the intervention. The results for each participant and emotion category varied greatly, but each participant demonstrated improvement in the PND for at least one emotion category. These results were promising and underscore the value of social communication intervention for children with LI in the area of emotion understanding.

Drawing is valued as a non-verbal assessment tool to measure children's conceptual development and emotional state. Drawing has also been described as a problem-solving activity and unique symbol system. Although drama has been known to facilitate learning in other symbol systems, such as reading and writing, and to bring about advances in perspective taking and understanding of emotion, its impact on drawing has not been previously examined. In this study, Kindergarten and first grade children were instructed to draw a happy tree, sad tree, and angry tree before and after a 10-hour drama intervention. Half of the children participated in the intervention while the remaining children were members of a control group who participated in the regular school program. Consistent with expectations, children who participated in the drama program showed significantly greater improvement from pretest to posttest in drawing emotion compared to control children. Their drawings of emotion improved in clarity, that is, they depicted more clearly the emotion they were instructed to convey. Participants in the drama program also used significantly more highter level drawing strategies. The results suggest that the experience in emotional perspective taking provided by dramatic play may generalize to the domain of drawing and enhance expression.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-09-08T12:02:00Z No. of bitstreams: 1 deyseaparecidaribas.pdf: 614073 bytes, checksum: db6755873fc8af90754fc8898e117931 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Diamantino Mayra (mayra.diamantino@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-09-09T10:50:54Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 deyseaparecidaribas.pdf: 614073 bytes, checksum: db6755873fc8af90754fc8898e117931 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-09T10:50:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 deyseaparecidaribas.pdf: 614073 bytes, checksum: db6755873fc8af90754fc8898e117931 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-09-20 / A teoria da mente, entendimento que as crianças elaboram acerca da mente, incluindo-se emoções, intenções, desejos e crenças, permite predizer o comportamento e formular o entendimento do mundo social. A compreensão das emoções, um dos aspectos constituintes da teoria da mente, também influencia o conhecimento sociocognitivo e parece estar intimamente ligada à trajetória de desenvolvimento social e ao ajustamento escolar. Tal constatação leva a indagar sobre como se daria a compreensão das emoções nas crianças que apresentam um tipo de comportamento diferenciado, como o comportamento agressivo. A presente pesquisa objetivou investigar a relação entre a teoria da mente – especificamente a compreensão das emoções – e o comportamento agressivo. Buscou-se compreender a relação entre compreensão das emoções e agressividade em crianças do ensino fundamental por meio da comparação entre as crianças que apresentam indicadores de comportamento agressivo e as que não apresentam tais indicadores. Participaram do estudo 115 crianças de ambos os sexos, alunos do primeiro ano do ensino fundamental de duas escolas da rede municipal de ensino da cidade de Juiz de Fora. Desta amostra inicial, selecionou-se um subgrupo de 60 crianças – 30 alunos identificados como socialmente competentes e 30 alunos com indícios de comportamento agressivo, assim identificados por seus professores por meio da Escala de Percepção por Professores dos Comportamentos Agressivos de Criança na Escola. As crianças de ambos os grupos foram avaliadas quanto ao desenvolvimento da teoria da mente, pela Escala de Tarefas em Teoria da Mente, e quanto à compreensão das emoções por meio do Teste de Inteligência Emocional para Crianças. Os resultados obtidos evidenciam uma relação entre teoria da mente e desenvolvimento social e indicam a influência da habilidade de compreensão das emoções para o ajustamento socioemocional infantil. Verificou-se diferença estatisticamente significativa entre os dois grupos quanto à teoria da mente – na tarefa de Acesso ao Conhecimento e no escore geral da Escala – e quanto à compreensão emocional – no subcomponente Compreensão e Análise de Emoções. De forma geral, as crianças identificadas como não agressivas tenderam a apresentar uma teoria da mente e compreensão emocional mais sofisticadas, quando comparadas às crianças com indícios de comportamento agressivo. / The theory of mind, understanding children elaborate about the mind, including emotions, intentions, desires and creed, let it predict their behavior and formulate the understanding of the social world. The emotion understanding, one of the founding aspects of the theory of mind, also influences the social-cognitive knowledge and seems to be closely connected to the social development path and scholar adjustment. Such constatation make us question about how emotion understanding would be on children that shows differentiated behavior, like aggressive behavior. This research aimed to explore the relations between the theory of mind – specifically the emotion understanding – and the aggressive behavior. It also aimed the understanding of the relation between emotion understanding and aggressiveness in children in fundamental school using comparisons between children that shows signs of aggressive behavior and children that don't show such signs. One hundred fifteen children on their first grade at two Juiz de Fora's fundamental school, both male and female, took part on the study. Among this initial sample, a subgroup of 60 children was selected – 30 students were identified by their teachers as socially suitable and 30 students were identified with aggressive behavior signs by the Escala de Percepção por Professores dos Comportamentos Agressivos de Criança na Escola. Children of both groups were evaluated regarding their development of the theory of mind, by the Scaling of Theory of Mind Tasks, and regarding their emotion understanding by the Teste de Inteligência Emocional para Crianças. The results showed a relation between the theory of mind and social development and pointed the influence of the emotion understanding ability level for the infant social-emotional adjustment. A significant statistical difference between the two groups regarding to the theory of mind was verified on the task of Knowledge Access and the Scale's final general score – regarding the emotional comprehension – on the sub-component Compreensão e Análise das Emoções. On a general level, children identified as non-aggressive tended to show the theory of the mind and emotional comprehension more accurate than children with signs of aggressive behavior when they were compared.

Historically, social communication approaches to intervention for children with developmental language disorders (DLD) have been limited. However, several recent studies have shown that these interventions can produce positive changes in children with DLD. One weakness that children with DLD demonstrate is the production of words to express emotion. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of a story-based social communication intervention to increase the production of emotion words in three elementary school-age children diagnosed with DLD. Data were collected and analyzed in pre-treatment baseline sessions, throughout the intervention, and in post-treatment follow-up data for the seven target emotion word categories of happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and contempt. The specific targeted emotion word categories were determined based on individual participants limited proficiency during baseline sessions. Thus, the emotions targeted were unique to each child. Intervention consisted of 40 intervention sessions using a combination of storybook therapeutic strategies (e.g., story enactment, story sharing, and modeling by the clinician to help increase the child's emotion understanding) as well as emotion recognition and emotion inferencing tasks. Each participants data were analyzed and presented in figures. The percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) was used in data analysis, quantifying how successful the intervention was for each of the targeted emotions. While the target emotion word categories varied between participants, all of the children showed improvement in the targeted emotions. While the intervention was more effective for some children than others, all increased in their ability to use the target emotion words more accurately as a result of participating in intervention.