Emotion Talk Research Articles

Social Presence in Blended Course Forums in the Training of Preservice Teachers

Integration of blended learning environments into the learning process of teacher training may lead to the realization of an educational vision of creating a collaborative learning environment, with the aim to develop social-emotional skills and establish a learning community. The research question of this study was: What are the factors that affect social involvement in forums and the perception of threat and challenge of preservice teachers in a blended course? Participating in this mixed-method study were 120 Israeli preservice teachers, who completed a threat/challenge questionnaire and answered open questions. One of the most noteworthy findings was that many students felt a threat reading the posts written by other students, more so than they felt regarding writing their own responses on the forum. Many students noted that the forums allowed them to express their opinions, raise questions, share, enrich, and support. Forums encourage social emotional dialogue, and the giving and receiving of feedback.

Therapist’s emotional presence and its interactional functions in promoting client change in relationship-focused integrative psychotherapy

Therapeutic alliance is often posed as an explanation for why therapy works, and there seems to be a consistent finding that the stronger the alliance, the greater the therapeutic change. Although extensively documented in the professional literature as an essential aspect of therapeutic alliance, the concept of emotional presence and its actualization in moment-by-moment interaction have not been adequately described. This paper applies integrative qualitative methodology, including tools and insights from discourse analysis and conversation analysis, to five extracts of Relationship-focused Integrative Psychotherapy sessions with three different clients. It examines the concept of emotional presence operationalized in terms of the therapist’s invoking the client’s immediate experience. The analytical focus falls on an interactive sequence involving the therapist’s topicalization of the client’s (proffered) non-verbal cues aiming at eliciting emotion talk in the interactional here-and-now and the latter’s orientation to it. The psychotherapist’s strategy of emotional presence is proposed to play a salient role in promoting the client’s (gradual) change by focusing the talk on the client’s here-and-now experience. Thus clients are prompted to project their emotions and/or engage in overt self-reflexive examination of emotional and relational patterns in the immediate context of their concrete trouble-telling. By being regularly exposed to such practices in therapy, clients are instilled with a sense of being in touch with how they feel about a particular situation or person.

Morality-in-interaction: Toddlers’ recyclings of institutional discourses of feeling during peer disputes in daycare

AbstractEveryday discursive practices comprising “emotion talk” constitute a site where morality is socialized. Yet few studies have examined how emotional expressions are assembled and serve as integral parts of the unfolding action in multi-party, remedial interchanges involving caregivers and children in early care settings. This paper examines a particular type of emotion talk, complement constructions with verbs of feeling (“want”) and saying (e.g., “Are you saying ‘no don’t stand on me’?) primed by caregivers as part of a curriculum encouraging children to use their words to express their feelings so children become sensitized to one another’s hurt feeling during peer disputes. The data were drawn from a larger corpus of video recordings of children’s naturalistic interaction collected over two years in two toddler-infant daycare centers with children aged 12–30 months. A talk-in-interaction approach was adopted. The syntactic formats provided to children by caregivers, and how children and caregivers recycled and laminated utterances with different kinds of modalities over turns, uncovered usually unarticulated normative socio-cultural assumptions regarding the shaping of affect at the daycare. The results illustrate how affective work in remedial interchanges provides a resource for participants to articulate moral values and underscore children’s agency.

Toward integrating research on parent–child emotion talk and linguistic theory: A spotlight on parents’ (in)direct communication

AbstractParent–child discussions about emotion are a key socialization influence on children’s socio‐emotional development. Extant research on parent–child discussions about emotion largely focuses on three main types of discourse content: parental elaboration, parental use of emotion labels and explanations, and parental emotion coaching. A new direction involves distinguishing between parents’ direct and indirect communication of discourse content. This distinction may be vital when considering the role of children’s communicative competence in their developing socio‐emotional competence. We integrate literature on (in)direct communication, a concept prominent in linguistics, and emotion socialization. We argue that parental indirect communication can teach children communicative competence in the context of emotion talk. We discuss literature from the developmental and linguistic fields on parents’ teaching of communicative skills, as well as potential cognitive, relational, and emotional functions of indirectness, with communication and its socialization embedded within cultural context. Finally, we suggest new research directions examining the role of parental indirect communication in children’s socio‐emotional development. By integrating developmental and linguistic literatures, we provide a novel approach to the study of parental emotion socialization through parent–child discourse.

The Effect of Skin Contact on Maternal-infant Attachment Behaviors in Emotional, Proximity-seeking, and Caretaking Dimensions in Planned and Unplanned Pregnancies in 2017, Iran: A Research

Background: Unplanned pregnancy is a potential danger for women’s lives in the reproduction ages. Objective: The present study aimed to compare planned and unplanned pregnancies regarding the maternal-infant attachment behaviors in emotional, proximity-seeking, and caretaking dimensions. Methods: The present analytical case-control study was conducted on 140 women who had given birth to their children in the hospitals affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2017. The participants were divided into planned and unplanned pregnancy groups. Within the first hour and 24 hours after birth, the babies were put naked in skin-to-skin contact with their mothers for 15 minutes and the study questionnaire was completed. The data were collected using the Avant checklist. P<0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. Results: The mean score of attachment in the early hours was 84.22±12.59 in the planned pregnancy group and 74.28±15.81 in the unplanned pregnancy group, and the difference was statistically significant (p<0.001). However, no significant difference was observed between the two groups in this regard after 24 hours (p=0.122). Additionally, the results revealed a significant difference between the two groups concerning emotional (p<0.001) and caretaking (p=0.007) behaviors. However, no significant difference was found between the two groups regarding the three behaviors after 24 hours. Emotional (talking and smiling, p=0.001), proximity-seeking (circling one’s arms around the baby, p=0.001), and caretaking (paying attention to the baby, p=0.001) behaviors were significantly more observed in the two groups in the early hours and the first 24 hours. Conclusions: Mother’s skin-to-skin contact with her baby during lactation increased attachment in unplanned pregnancies after 24 hours.

A Digital Library for Increasing Awareness About Living Donor Kidney Transplants: Formative Study.

BackgroundIt is not common for people to come across a living kidney donor, let alone consider whether they would ever donate a kidney themselves while they are alive. Narrative storytelling, the sharing of first-person narratives based on lived experience, may be an important way to improve education about living donor kidney transplants (LDKTs). Developing ways to easily standardize and disseminate diverse living donor stories using digital technology could inspire more people to consider becoming living donors and reduce the kidney shortage nationally.ObjectiveThis paper aimed to describe the development of the Living Donation Storytelling Project, a web-based digital library of living donation narratives from multiple audiences using video capture technology. Specifically, we aimed to describe the theoretical foundation and development of the library, a protocol to capture diverse storytellers, the characteristics and experiences of participating storytellers, and the frequency with which any ethical concerns about the content being shared emerged.MethodsThis study invited kidney transplant recipients who had received LDKTs, living donors, family members, and patients seeking LDKTs to record personal stories using video capture technology by answering a series of guided prompts on their computer or smartphone and answering questions about their filming experience. The digital software automatically spliced responses to open-ended prompts, creating a seamless story available for uploading to a web-based library and posting to social media. Each story was reviewed by a transplant professional for the disclosure of protected health information (PHI), pressuring others to donate, and medical inaccuracies. Disclosures were edited.ResultsThis study recruited diverse storytellers through social media, support groups, churches, and transplant programs. Of the 137 storytellers who completed the postsurvey, 105/137 (76.6%) were white and 99/137 (72.2%) were female. They spent 62.5 min, on average, recording their story, with a final median story length of 10 min (00:46 seconds to 32:16 min). A total of 94.8% (130/137) of storytellers were motivated by a desire to educate the public; 78.1% (107/137) were motivated to help more people become living donors; and 75.9% (104/137) were motivated to dispel myths. The ease of using the technology and telling their story varied, with the fear of being on film, emotional difficulty talking about their experiences, and some technological barriers being reported. PHI, most commonly surnames and transplant center names, was present in 62.9% (85/135) of stories and was edited out.ConclusionsWith appropriate sensitivity to ensure diverse recruitment, ethical review of content, and support for storytellers, web-based storytelling platforms may be a cost-effective and convenient way to further engage patients and increase the curiosity of the public in learning more about the possibility of becoming living donors.

Вариативность языковых способов выражения директивных речевых актов (на материале французского языка)

The article examines the problem of variability of the linguistic means expressing directive speech acts by the material of the modern French detective novel “An Apartment in Paris” by the popular writer Guillaume Musso. The policemen’s discourse full of vivid and emotional dialogues was chosen as the research material. The research objective is to identify directive speech acts and to classify them depending on the parameters of a communicative situation. The analysis of Musso’s novel resulted in identifying 22 directive speech acts and allowed concluding on variability of the linguistic means used to express them.

Racial disparities in clinician responses to patient emotions

ObjectiveIn a previous study of patients newly enrolled in HIV care, we observed that clinicians were less likely to address emotional issues expressed by African-American patients compared to whites. We sought to verify and expand these findings in a larger group of patients established in HIV care. MethodsWe used VR-CoDES to analyze transcripts from 342 audio-recorded medical visits in the United States. We used random intercept multilevel logistic regression to assess associations between patient and clinician characteristics and patterns of emotional talk. ResultsAfrican-American patients were less likely than others to spontaneously express emotions (OR 0.50; 95 % CI 0.29−0.85). Clinicians, who were predominantly white, were more likely to respond to emotional expressions by African-American patients explicitly (OR 1.56; 95 % CI 1.11–2.20) but less likely to offer neutral/passive responses that provide space for emotional conversation (OR 0.56; 95 % CI 0.37−0.84) and more likely to block discussion of the emotional issue (OR 2.20; 95 % CI 1.05–4.63). Emotional talk did not vary by patient age or gender. ConclusionThese results confirm our prior findings, demonstrating less open emotional communication between African-American patients and their providers. Practice ImplicationsAddressing racial differences in communicating about emotions may reduce disparities in patient-clinician relationships.

Emotion talk in Chinese American immigrant families and longitudinal links to children’s socioemotional competence.

Parent emotion talk (ET), a type of emotion-related socialization practice, is theorized to foster children's emotion-related regulation and socioemotional skills. Yet, there has been limited research linking parent ET to children's effortful control, a top-down regulatory process. Despite the observed cultural differences in ET between Chinese and European American families, few researchers tested whether the socioemotional benefits of ET are generalizable to Chinese American families, an immigrant group with contrasting values in their heritage and host cultures. The present study examined Chinese American parents' ET, its associations with sociocultural factors, and prospective relations to school-age children's effortful control, sympathy, and socially appropriate behaviors. In a two-wave (1.5 years apart) longitudinal study of first- and second-generation Chinese American children (N = 258, age = 6-9 years at Wave 1, 52% from low-income families), the content and quality of parent ET (e.g., the overall quality of emotion talk, frequency of emotion explanations, emotion questions, and number of emotion words) was coded from a video-recorded shared book reading task. Children's effortful control, sympathy, and social behaviors were rated by parents, teachers, and children. Results showed that the Chinese American parents from lower socioeconomic status families, families with lower English proficiency, or more recent immigrants displayed lower ET. Parent ET was prospectively related to children's higher effortful control after controlling for stability, and higher effortful control was concurrently associated with children's higher sympathy and more socially appropriate behaviors. The findings provide empirical support for the socioemotional benefits of ET for school-age children in Chinese American immigrant families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Maternal emotion socialization in early childhood predicts adolescents' amygdala-vmPFC functional connectivity to emotion faces.

Guided by Eisenberg, Cumberland, and Spinrad's (1998) conceptual framework, we examined multiple components of maternal emotion socialization (i.e., reactions to children's negative emotion, emotion talk, emotional expressiveness) at 33 months of age as predictors of adolescents' amygdala-vmPFC connectivity and amygdala activation when labeling and passively observing angry and happy faces. For angry faces, more positive maternal emotion socialization behaviors predicted (a) less positive amygdala-vmPFC connectivity, which may reflect more mature vmPFC downregulation of the amygdala activation underlying implicit emotion regulation, and (b) more amygdala activation, which may reflect higher sensitivity to others' emotional cues. Associations between negative emotion socialization behaviors and neural responses to angry faces were nonsignificant, and findings for the models predicting neural responses to happy faces showed a less consistent pattern. By expanding Eisenberg et al.'s (1998) framework to consider neural processing of negative emotions, the current findings point toward the potential long-term implications of positive emotion socialization experiences during early childhood for optimal functioning of the amygdala-vmPFC circuitry during adolescence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Contingency in Teacher-Child Emotional State Talk during Shared Book Reading in Early Childhood Classrooms

ABSTRACT Research Findings: The aim of this study was to investigate emotional state talk between teachers and their students in 81 early childhood classrooms during shared book reading. Teachers shared with their students an experimental emotion narrative book. Preliminary analysis of teachers’ and children’s transcribed utterances during reading addressed the frequencies of emotional terms, form (question vs. comment), and content (emotion identification, emotion causality, emotion inference, or non-emotional content). Sequential analysis evaluated contingent relations between the book text and teachers’ comments and questions about emotions as well as between teachers’ and children’s contingent responses to each other. Results showed emotional excerpts from the book were significantly associated with teachers’ questions and comments about emotion identification. Children were highly specific and responsive to teachers’ emotional state talk, and children’s comments about emotions evoked further considerations from teachers about the same topics. Practice or Policy: Our results highlight the importance of the presence of emotional terms in the book text to stimulate emotional state talk. Given the value of emotional state talk for children’s emotional development, teachers must be informed of preschoolers’ ability to consistently participate in classroom discussions about emotions, even when complex topics like causality and inferences are addressed.

Teacher-child emotion talk in preschool children displaying elevated externalizing behaviors

This study examined teacher-child emotion talk in a sample of preschool children rated by their teachers as displaying elevated externalizing behaviors (N = 470). Emotion talk was observed using a teacher-child dyadic storybook reading task. We examined the link between emotion talk and children's gains in their observed positive engagement with teachers across the preschool year. To isolate the unique contribution of emotion talk, we accounted for the affective quality of teacher-child interactions and relationships and children's receptive language skills. We also explored whether the link between emotion talk and children's positive engagement with their teacher was moderated by teacher-child affective qualities. The results provide evidence that if teachers offer frequent opportunities to talk about emotions in the context of warm and sensitive dyadic interactions, children connect and communicate more with their teachers regardless of their initial engagement level. Implications for early childhood teachers practice are discussed.

'Best for the Protagonists Involved': Views from Senior Tort Lawyers on the Value of Mediation in Victorian Medical Negligence Disputes

Mediation is a dispute resolution process that is more informal and less expensive than litigation, offering confidentiality and encouraging party voice. In medical negligence, parties can experience the benefits that arise in the discourse of mediation, including an explanation about the medical error, or an expression of an apology. In this study, 24 senior tort lawyers were interviewed to explore the use of mediation in medical negligence. Data analysis shows that the participants valued mediation in medical negligence disputes as a case management tool that assisted clients to avoid the stress of litigation. Some lawyers specifically referred to the Civil Procedure Act 2010 (Vic) as promoting mediation. As repeat players and advocates, the participants shielded their client from the legal system and dominated the mediation process. The majority of participants discouraged their client from speaking and prevented emotional engagement and dialogue with the tortfeasor. This research found that the model adopted by the senior tort lawyers resembles an evaluative or settlement style of mediation. The lawyers stymied the full potential of the process and diminished opportunities for party voice. The authors argue that better education for tort lawyers regarding the benefits of mediation would better meet the non-legal and emotional needs of disputants.

Responding to children’s ‘emotion talk’: a conversation analysis of a therapeutic encounter between a social worker and two siblings using child-centred play therapy

ABSTRACTReflection of feelings is a hallmark strategy of non-directive child-centred play therapy that enhances children’s emotional awareness and equips them with emotionally expressive words. The case presented here describes the application of child-centred play therapy by a social worker with two young children (aged four and six) with sibling rivalry issues. One of the sessions was videotaped, which enabled the use of conversation analysis to dissect the language patterns used by both the clients and the social worker. This in-depth verbal analysis illuminated subtle nuances in the children’s interactions and behaviour while also providing the social worker with the opportunity to reflect on practice. This case discussion presents a snapshot of that session and allows readers to understand how such therapy occurs.

Emotion Socialization and Developmental Risk: Interactive Effects of Receptive Language and Maltreatment on Reminiscing.

Emotional reminiscing, or mother-child discussion of past emotional experiences, is a critical aspect of emotion socialization that predicts a range of child outcomes and is central to parent-child interventions. Thus, understanding individual differences in emotional reminiscing will advance our ability to identify families at-risk for poor emotion dialogues and to adapt interventions for diverse populations, such as families affected by maltreatment and mothers and children with low language abilities. The present study examined associations among maternal and child receptive language with emotional reminiscing and the moderating role of maltreatment. Two hundred and twenty three underserved, racially diverse mothers (144 maltreating) and their preschool aged children completed measures of receptive language (PPVT-4). Emotional reminiscing was comprehensively measured using maternal report and observations of emotion dialogues, including ratings of elaborations, maternal sensitive guidance, and child cooperative exploration. Child language was positively associated with all observed aspects of child reminiscing, and the association between child language and maternal reminiscing was moderated by maltreatment. For non-maltreating families, child language was positively associated with maternal factual elaborations and sensitive guidance. For the maltreating families, these associations were not significant, demonstrating that maltreatment disrupted the association between child language and reminiscing. Maternal language was significantly associated with maternal report of emotion dismissing behaviors, regardless of maltreatment status. Results highlight that language is an essential individual difference factor contributing to variance in emotion dialogues, and that maltreatment influences how child language relates to reminiscing. Future directions and clinical implications for families affected by developmental risk are considered.

Dialogues about Emotional Events between Mothers with Anxiety, Depression, Anorexia Nervosa, and No Diagnosis and Their Children

SYNOPSISObjective. Mothers with psychiatric diagnoses have been found to be generally less responsive and sensitive when interacting with their children, but studies of the quality of their dialogues with their children have not been conducted. Such dialogues are associated with children’s coherent representations of their experiences, which promote resilience and coping. Design. The present study focused on mothers with a diagnosis of anxiety (n = 23), depression (n = 23), or anorexia nervosa (n = 20) and mothers without any diagnosis (n = 21) and examined their dialogues with their children regarding children’s emotional experiences using the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogues procedure. Results. Maternal diagnosis of depression and anorexia nervosa were associated with distinct, non-matched emotion dialogues, whereas the emotion dialogues of mothers with anxiety were not different from those of non-diagnosed mothers. Children in all three diagnostic groups showed less cooperation and coherence during the dialogues about their emotions compared to the children of the mothers in the non-clinical group. Conclusions. Maternal psychopathology may affect the mother-child dyad’s capacity for recalling, describing, and co-constructing emotion-laden narratives.

Maternal Elaborative Language in Shared Emotion Talk with ODD Children: Relationship to Child Emotion Competencies.

While maternal elaborative reminiscing has been found to be positively connected to children's emotion competencies, little is known about how the quality of maternal talk during mother-child talk about shared emotion events relates to emotional competencies in children with disruptive behavioural disorders. In this study of 68 four to eight year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder and 34 children without a diagnosis there was no evidence of differences between mothers of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) children and mothers of non-ODD children in their use of emotion descriptors and open-ended questions when discussing emotion events with their child. After controlling for child age, gender, expressive verbal abilities and number of conversational turns, the more the mothers used these devices the poorer child's ability to generate causes for emotions and the lower the child's emotion regulation ability. The association for child emotion regulation was moderated by child's diagnostic status with a notable relationship for ODD mother-child dyads but not for the other group. The implications of the findings for the conceptualisation of mother-child talk and its relationship to the development of emotion competencies in children with disruptive behavioural problems are discussed.

Internal state language and resolution strategies in preschoolers’ narratives about sad experiences

ABSTRACT The present study explored preschoolers’ internal state language and resolution strategies in sad stories that shifted to a positive emotional tone. Fifty-four 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds attending a laboratory preschool shared stories about ‘a time when you were happy/sad.’ Stories were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded for internal state language, emotional tone shift, and resolutions. Consistent with past work, children reported more internal states in sad (v. happy) stories. Children who shifted their sad stories to a positive emotional tone compared to those whose stories remained sad included more emotion talk and cognitive states, and used a variety of resolution strategies. Descriptive analysis suggested that the distribution of strategies differed by age of the child, with 5-year-olds utilising more strategies, and strategies more cognitively complex compared to younger children. Findings provide new insight into the ways preschoolers make meaning out of and resolve sad experiences through personal narratives.

Deliberative emotional talk

High-quality talk about issues that raise high-intensity emotions in the public sphere is timely needed. Still, researchers committed to the fostering of high-quality types of school talk generally disregard the role of emotions. We show that this disregard is not accidental and that it conveys a customary reluctance in schools to consider the handling of emotions as they pertain to cognition. We argue that helping students regulate emotions in social interactions and in discussions that raise high-intensity emotions is an important educational purpose, and we show that discussions about controversial issues provide a suitable context for this purpose. To support the emergence of high-quality talk that involves strong emotions, we adopted a design-based research approach and developed a new Computer-supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) tool, the Hot Discussions Platform (HDP). The functionalities of HDP are crucial for the emergence and guidance of high-quality talk that involves strong emotions, and they describe a novel professional development (PD) approach to the enhancement and moderation of this kind of talk. In the in-service PD course, teachers are prepared to design, moderate, and analyze discussions about controversial issues. Group assignments in the course and personal interviews revealed that the teachers that underwent this program reported on a very rich list of practices and beliefs about the emotional labor involved in designing and moderating discussions about controversial issues. The study provides an existence proof of a kind of talk that combines compliance with argumentative-critical standards and an eagerness to express and regulate strong emotions. We call this general kind of talk deliberative emotional talk. We conclude by reflecting on future research and technological developments to be invested into studying forms of deliberative emotional talk and support its emergence.

Japanese children’s emotion talk: relations to cultural values and their prosocial and aggressive behaviors

Cultural values influence people’s views and behaviors and are reflected in their language. Interdependent cultures’ emphasis on group harmony and Japanese culture’s focus on social connection may shape how Japanese children interpret and describe emotions, which could contribute to how they interact with others. In this study, 63 Japanese 7-year-olds read a wordless picture book containing various emotional scenes to their parents. Children’s utterances were transcribed, and then emotion words were coded into categories. The parents rated their children’s prosocial and aggressive behaviors on a 24-item questionnaire. The results show that (1) the children talked more about negative emotions than positive emotions presented in the picture book, and (2) in positive emotional scenes, many children described the characters’ harmonious relationship status rather than the characters’ emotions, suggesting that their emotional perceptions may be shaped by interdependent and Japanese cultural values. Also, their emotion word usage predicted their prosocial and aggressive behaviors. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to cultural context and parental socialization.