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Talking about feelings: young children's ability to express emotions
1School of English and Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor, UK.
Child Abuse & Neglect
|January 16, 1998
Summary
Children under 8 years have limited emotion vocabulary. Even 11-year-olds struggle to describe emotions like adults, impacting child interviews.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistic Development
- Childhood Emotional Expression
Background:
- Understanding children's emotional vocabulary is crucial for accurate communication.
- Previous research indicates developmental differences in emotion understanding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the age-related development of emotion-descriptive language in children.
- To identify specific emotion labels used by children across different age groups.
Main Methods:
- Fifty-six children aged 5-11 years participated.
- Emotion-eliciting scenarios were created using playpeople and toys.
- Children responded to interviewer questions about characters' feelings.
Main Results:
- Children under 8 years demonstrated a restricted range of emotion labels.
- Eleven-year-old children could not express emotion concepts as comprehensively as adults.
- Significant age-related differences in emotion vocabulary were observed.
Conclusions:
- Children's ability to describe emotions develops significantly with age.
- Findings have implications for communication with children, particularly in legal settings like child-police interviews.
- Further research is needed to support children's emotional expression.