The relationship between emotional-state language and emotion understanding: A study with school-age children

Abstract

We carried out an investigation with primary-school children on the relationship between both use and comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding. Participants were 100 students between 7 and 10 years old (mean age=8 years and 10 months; SD=15.3 months), equally divided by gender. They completed four tests evaluating their language ability, use of emotional-state language, comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding (EU) respectively. Significant correlations were found between both use and comprehension of emotional-state talk and children's EU. In addition, regression analyses showed that comprehension of emotional-state language, rather than its use, plays a significant role in explaining children's emotion understanding.

Keywords:

• Emotional-state language
• Use and comprehension of the psychological lexicon
• Emotion understanding
• Theory of mind

Acknowledgments

This study is part of a project funded by University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Human Sciences “R. Massa”, through a research grant to Ilaria Grazzani (F.A.R. 2009 and F.A. 2010).

We especially wish to thank the head teachers and teachers for their kind assistance, and all the pupils who took part in the study. We are very grateful to Dr Francesca Piralli for helping us to collect the data. We also thank Dr Clare O'Sullivan for the linguistic revision of the paper.

Notes

¹With the entry of the interactive effects (age × use, age × comprehension, gender × use, and gender × comprehension) in the two regression models, a negligible increase of the explained variance emerged (R ² = .36) and comprehension of emotional-state language was confirmed to be the most important variable in explaining performance on the EU task (β = 0.61; p < .001). Specifically, only the interaction age × comprehension was significant (β = −3.56; p = .02) given that the power of ELT scores to explain performance on the TEC was higher in the younger group (intercept baseline value = −5.99) than in the older one (intercept baseline value = −2.43).