Facilitating Children's Perception of Emotions

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of an intervention designed to facilitate children's perception of emotions. Children in the experimental group were presented with videotaped scenes of children and, in order to enhance the category accessibility of cues for the perception of emotion, instructed to infer the emotions of the children in the video and to describe those emotions as well as the cues they had used to make their inferences. The dependent variable was the degree of attention paid to the emotions of other children. Participants in the study were 113 fifth-graders in an elementary school. The children in the experimental group participated in the training sessions for 11 days. Before and after the training period, children in both conditions were asked to describe the emotions they had perceived while interacting with other children during the preceding 2 weeks. The dependent variable was the number of descriptions reported. Statistical analysis indicated that the children in the experimental condition had paid more attention to the emotions of children they had interacted with than had the children in the control condition.