The Use of Dyadic Reading in Stimulating the Comprehension of Emotions

Abstract

According to the model proposed by Pons, Doudin, and Harris , children develop nine components of emotion comprehension between the ages of three to twelve. Studies reveal that children's comprehension of emotions can be stimulated by adults reading books designed for this purpose to preschool-aged children. The aim of this study is to explore whether dyadic reading is an effective strategy for stimulating emotion comprehension in school-aged children. Elementary school children (3rd, 4th and 5th grade) participated in the experimental or the control group. The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) was administered at pretest and post-test. Participants in the experimental group read the books on emotion comprehension for five sessions, while participants in the control group read classroom books. Results revealed that reading the emotion comprehension books increased the TEC post-test scores significantly from pretest for children in the experimental group, compared to the control group. For the Components Reminder, Belief and Morality scores at post-test were significantly increased from pretest for children in the experimental group, compared to the control group. Results suggest that dyadic book readings are successful in helping children with both complex components of their emotion comprehension and simpler ones. This intervention could be of use for teaching school-aged children emotion comprehension easily, effectively, and at low-cost.

Keywords:

• Dyadic reading
• emotion comprehension
• school-aged children

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by a Consortium National de Formation en Santé grant from Health Canada to Annie Roy-Charland and Mélanie Perron as well as an Internal Research Grant from Université de Moncton to Jacques Richard. Data collection was completed as part of Sarah Lewis and Megan Pallister’s Honor’s these and Mylène Michaud’s research practicum. Data is available upon request.