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Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Conversations about emotion in high-risk dyads.
H Abigail Raikes1, Ross A Thompson
1University of California, Davis, CA, USA. abbie.raikes@gatesfoundation.org
Attachment & Human Development
|November 19, 2008
Summary
Secure attachment and low family risks enhance early emotion understanding. Maternal conversation quality and child emotion language are key predictors of children's developing emotional intelligence.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Childhood Social-Emotional Development
- Family Studies
Background:
- Early emotional understanding is crucial for child development.
- Maternal elaborative discourse supports children's emotion understanding.
- Factors influencing maternal discourse and its impact on child emotion language and understanding require further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine relational and risk factors influencing maternal discourse style.
- To investigate the association between maternal discourse content/quality and children's emotion language.
- To determine how these factors predict children's emotion understanding.
Main Methods:
- Longitudinal study of a high-risk sample.
- Assessment of attachment security and family risks at age 2.
- Observation of mother-child emotion conversations at age 3, measuring maternal discourse and child emotion words/labels.
- Independent assessment of child emotion understanding at age 4.
Main Results:
- Maternal discourse content and quality were negatively related to family risk factors and positively associated with secure attachment.
- Child emotion language in conversation was positively associated with secure attachment, independent of child language and maternal discourse.
- Children's emotion language ability predicted their emotion understanding.
Conclusions:
- Secure attachment and lower family risks are linked to more effective maternal discourse.
- Secure attachment uniquely contributes to children's development of emotion language.
- Children's proficiency in emotion language is a significant predictor of their overall emotion understanding.
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