Emotion Talk Research Articles

Emotion talk during mother–child reminiscing and book sharing and children’s socioemotional competence: evidence from Costa Rica and Germany

This paper examined cross-cultural differences in emotion talk during reminiscing and book sharing and its link with children’s social problem-solving skills. Twenty-six Costa Rican mothers, representing the cultural model of autonomy-relatedness, and 26 German mothers, representing the cultural model of autonomy, discussed a negative past event and read a book with their 4-year-old children. Children’s social problem-solving skills were also assessed. Results indicated that cultural contexts did not differ in complexity of emotion talk but Costa Rican dyads talked overall more about emotions than German dyads. Costa Rican dyads marked others as the agents of emotions more often than German dyads, but groups did not differ in the frequency of emotions referring to the child as the agent. Across cultural contexts, mother–child dyads provided significantly more emotional attributions than emotion explanations during book sharing, but not during reminiscing. Emotion talk was related to children’s social problem-solving skills for the Costa Rican group, but not for the German group. The higher the amount of emotion talk in Costa Rican dyads during reminiscing, the lower the child’s social problem-solving skills. Results are discussed in light of the culture-specific nature of emotion socialization and its relation to children’s socioemotional development.

Emotion-Focused Curricula Models and Expressions of and Talk About Emotions Between Teachers and Young Children

ABSTRACT Early childhood curricula reflect guiding principles or beliefs about the knowledge, skills, and behavior that are considered important for learning in the early childhood setting. This study examined linkages between teachers’ and young children’s expression of and talk about emotions during interactions in early childhood programs, using either the Creative Curriculum or the more emotion-focused Responsive Classroom approach. The research also examined teachers’ and children’s emotion-related behavior in relation to the gender composition of the interactions and teachers’ social-emotional teaching practices. Participants were 117 preschoolers (64 girls) and their teachers. Teachers and children in the Creative Curriculum classrooms displayed proportionately more negative emotional expressions than their counterparts in classrooms adopting the Responsive Classroom approach. Teachers’ negative emotional expressions were also more likely when children expressed negative emotions. Teachers’ and children’s negative expressions were less likely when teachers reported high use of social-emotional teaching practices. Teachers’ emotion talk was also more likely when social-emotional teaching practices were high. Gender composition of the interactions was also predictive of teachers’ emotion-related behavior. Discussion focuses on the important effect of curricula in supporting teachers’ and young children’s expression of and emotion talk in the early childhood classroom.

Speech Emotion Recognition From 3D Log-Mel Spectrograms With Deep Learning Network

Speech emotion recognition is a vital and challenging task that the feature extraction plays a significant role in the SER performance. With the development of deep learning, we put our eyes on the structure of end-to-end and authenticate the algorithm that is extraordinary effective. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture ADRNN (dilated CNN with residual block and BiLSTM based on the attention mechanism) to apply for the speech emotion recognition which can take advantage of the strengths of diverse networks and overcome the shortcomings of utilizing alone, and are evaluated in the popular IEMOCAP database and Berlin EMODB corpus. Dilated CNN can assist the model to acquire more receptive fields than using the pooling layer. Then, the skip connection can keep more historic info from the shallow layer and BiLSTM layer are adopted to learn long-term dependencies from the learned local features. And we utilize the attention mechanism to enhance further extraction of speech features. Furthermore, we improve the loss function to apply softmax together with the center loss that achieves better classification performance. As emotional dialogues are transformed of the spectrograms, we pick up the values of the 3-D Log-Mel spectrums from raw signals and put them into our proposed algorithm and obtain a notable performance to get the 74.96% unweighted accuracy in the speaker-dependent and the 69.32% unweighted accuracy in the speaker-independent experiment. It is better than the 64.74% from previous state-of-the-art methods in the spontaneous emotional speech of the IEMOCAP database. In addition, we propose the networks that achieve recognition accuracies of 90.78% and 85.39% on Berlin EMODB of speaker-dependent and speaker-independent experiment respectively, which are better than the accuracy of 88.30% and 82.82% obtained by previous work. For validating the robustness and generalization, we also make an experiment for cross-corpus between above databases and get the preferable 63.84% recognition accuracy in final.

Mindfulness training to support advance care planning: Qualitative findings from a randomized pilot.

4 Background: Emotional discomfort talking about end of life (EOL) often inhibits advance care planning (ACP). Mindfulness meditation facilitates emotional regulation through present-centered awareness and non-reactive coping and may help adults with cancer and their family caregivers (CGs) approach ACP with greater ease. As part of a randomized pilot study of a mindfulness intervention, we conducted qualitative interviews with cancer patients and their CGs to explore participants’ perceptions of the effects of mindfulness on EOL discussions and ACP. Methods: Adults with advanced solid malignancies and an estimated prognosis of < 12 months were randomized with their CG (N = 55 dyads) to receive standard care alone or standard care plus a 6-session mindfulness intervention that included guided mindfulness meditation, mindful communication practices, and ACP information. A subset of mindfulness patients (n = 20) and CGs (n = 15) completed semi-structured qualitative interviews post-intervention that were recorded, transcribed, and coded using a deductive approach. Results: Researchers identified three primary themes. For patients and CGs, the mindfulness intervention: (1) enhanced awareness and discussion of ACP; (2) increased acceptance of poor prognosis; and (3) fostered supportive communication. Consistent with these themes, patients noted that the intervention enabled them to begin to accept that cure may not be possible, helped them “get over the hurdle” of talking about EOL, and provided an opportunity to reflect on their life priorities, including goals of care. CGs reported that the intervention fostered ACP conversations that had been previously avoided, enhanced understanding of patient preferences that often differed from their own, and increased ability to accept realities of the patient’s illness. Patients and CGs both reported improved understanding of the need to plan for EOL, greater openness to discussing sensitive issues, and an enhanced ability to listen more deeply and communicate with greater kindness. Conclusions: Findings support the use of mindfulness training to equip patients and CGs for timely EOL discussions and ACP. Clinical trial information: NCT03257007.

Novel cascaded Gaussian mixture model-deep neural network classifier for speaker identification in emotional talking environments

This research is an effort to present an effective approach to enhance text-independent speaker identification performance in emotional talking environments based on novel classifier called cascaded Gaussian Mixture Model-Deep Neural Network (GMM-DNN). Our current work focuses on proposing, implementing and evaluating a new approach for speaker identification in emotional talking environments based on cascaded Gaussian Mixture Model-Deep Neural Network as a classifier. The results point out that the cascaded GMM-DNN classifier improves speaker identification performance at various emotions using two distinct speech databases: Emirati speech database (Arabic United Arab Emirates dataset) and Speech Under Simulated and Actual Stress (SUSAS) English dataset. The proposed classifier outperforms classical classifiers such as Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) in each dataset. Speaker identification performance that has been attained based on the cascaded GMM-DNN is similar to that acquired from subjective assessment by human listeners.

Language support gets families talking

Children and families get early support to live healthier lives, improve mental wellbeing and address emotional and communication issues PROJECT Let's Talk PURPOSE To improve the communication and language development of very young children and reduce referrals to the statutory speech and language therapy service FUNDING A Better Start Southend (ABSS) is part of the 10-year National Lottery-funded A Better Start programme set up by the Big Lottery Fund. In Southend, the programme is funded to the tune of £40m. Let's Talk has a £1.1m budget allocation, including staffing costs, from summer 2016 to summer 2019

Emotional talk of patients with breast cancer during review appointments with therapeutic radiographers: effects on fears of cancer recurrence

To investigate the management of emotional talk in patients with breast cancer attending their initial review appointments during radiotherapy and predict FCR at 6-8weeks follow-up. A mixed-methods observational study was conducted. Patients (consecutive sample, n = 60) with breast cancer, attending a major Scottish cancer centre, had their first two review appointments with their therapeutic radiographer (TR) audio-recorded. In addition, FCR was assessed (FCR7) at baseline and at 6-8weeks following their final radiotherapy visit. Two TRs participated. Audio files were coded by the VR-CoDES system to identify emotional cues and therapeutic radiographer (TR) responses. Linear regression models were tested for fit and to identify factors associated with follow-up FCR, i.e. patient cues, responses by TR. Follow-up FCR was predicted negatively (robust estimator, p = .01) by level of patient emotional talk at the second review session. The provision of space by the TR, at the second session, to enable patients to expand their emotional utterances was also associated, but negatively (p = .01), with follow-up FCR. These effects were maintained after inclusion of covariates: age, treatment received and living conditions. Patient's emotional expression and TR responses at the second review meeting predicted follow-up FCR. The study shows the effect of communication processes on this specific distress component of the patient's survivorship experience. NCT02599506.

Three-stage speaker verification architecture in emotional talking environments

Speaker verification performance in neutral talking environment is usually high, while it is sharply decreased in emotional talking environments. This performance degradation in emotional environments is due to the problem of mismatch between training in neutral environment while testing in emotional environments. In this work, a three-stage speaker verification architecture has been proposed to enhance speaker verification performance in emotional environments. This architecture is comprised of three cascaded stages: gender identification stage followed by an emotion identification stage followed by a speaker verification stage. The proposed framework has been evaluated on two distinct and independent emotional speech datasets: in-house dataset and Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts dataset. Our results show that speaker verification based on both gender information and emotion information is superior to each of speaker verification based on gender information only, emotion information only, and neither gender information nor emotion information. The attained average speaker verification performance based on the proposed framework is very alike to that attained in subjective assessment by human listeners.

Talking About Feelings: Mother-Child Emotion Dialogues Among Sexually Abused Children.

Mother–child dialogues about children’s emotional experiences are associated with children’s adaptive coping with stressful situations and mental health. Despite these findings, dialogues have not been examined yet in the context of child sexual abuse. This gap is surprising given that mother–child dialogues may particularly promote children’s recovery from traumatic events. The current exploratory study examined the quality of mother–child emotion dialogues, as well as the quality of child and maternal contributions to dialogues, among dyads with sexually abused children (n = 30; 60% female; M age = 8.03), as compared with dyads with nonabused children (n = 30; 60% female; M age = 8.20). Quality of dialogues was assessed using the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogue. Mothers reported on their own childhood maltreatment history and psychopathological symptoms. Results showed that dyads with abused children were more likely to engage in overwhelming/excessive dialogues and dialogues lacking content, as compared with dyads with nonabused children. After controlling for differences in background characteristics, mothers of abused children showed lower sensitive guidance. Although mothers of abused children had more experiences of childhood maltreatment and higher levels of psychopathology, they did not add to explain group differences in maternal sensitive guidance. Our findings suggest that the ability to discuss emotional experiences may be impaired among mother–child dyads with sexually abused children. This may be an important target in the treatment of sexually abused children and their families.

Emotions and identity work: Emotions as discursive resources in the constitution of junior professionals’ identities

For junior professionals, notions of professional identity established during their education are often called into question in the early stages of their professional careers. The workplace gives rise to identity challenges that manifest in significant emotional struggles. However, although extant literature highlights how emotions trigger and accompany identity work, the constitutive role of emotions in identity work is under-researched. In this article, we analyse how junior professionals mobilize emotions as discursive resources for identity work. Drawing on an empirical study of junior architects employed in professional service firms, we examine how professional identities, imbued with varying forms of discipline and agency, are discursively represented. The study makes two contributions to the literature on emotions and identity work. First, we identify three key identity work strategies ( idealizing, reframing and distancing) that are bound up in junior architects’ emotion talk. We suggest that these strategies act simultaneously as a coping mechanism and as a disciplinary force in junior architects’ efforts to constitute themselves as professionals. Second, we argue that identity work may not always lead to the accomplishment of a positive sense of self but can express a sense of disillusionment that leads to the constitution of dejected professional identities.

Emotions as Discursive Resources for Theorizing Institutional Change

In this paper, we take a discursive perspective on emotions and institutional work. We study emotion talk as discursive practice and emotions as discursive, cultural-cognitive resources for theoriz...

Introducing Movement into Couple Therapy: Clients’ Expectations and Perceptions

The integration of body-movement in couple therapy has gained increasing recognition in recent years. This study aimed at understanding the motivation and expectations of clients who have chosen to turn to Couple Psychotherapy through Movement and the extent to which they felt that these expectations were met in the process. Nine couples (n = 18 individuals) from a variety of backgrounds, religious affiliations, and countries of origin participated in 12 couple therapy sessions that included somatic and kinetic emphases. They were interviewed and responded to questionnaires both before and after the sessions. The findings indicated that the expectations of the participants related to a fuller expression of their difficulties and needs within the relationship through body-movement integrated therapy, and their perceptions of the process and its conclusion converged on three major themes: (a) the importance of introducing increased vitality, creativity, and playfulness into the relationship; (b) the need to learn a new mode of communication through the body; and (c) the contribution of bodily communication to the partners’ attainment of new insights about each other and their relationship. These findings highlight the role of the body in joint emotional experiences, suggesting that engaging in movement combined with verbal processing may enable partners to transform implicit bodily knowledge into conscious material in their relationship. The acquaintance with their own and their partners’ “somatic native tongue” will enhance the emotional dialogue between them, particularly in the context of ethnic and cultural diversity or different native tongues.

Communicating effectively about CSR on Twitter

PurposeCorporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is becoming increasingly important for brands and companies. Social media such as Twitter may be platforms particularly suited to this topic, given their ability to foster dialogue and content diffusion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors driving the effectiveness of CSR communication on Twitter, with a focus on the communication strategies and elements of storytelling.Design/methodology/approachUsing a sample of 281,291 tweets from top global companies in the food sector, automated content analysis (including supervised machine learning) was used to investigate the influence of CSR communication, emotion, and aspirational talk on the likelihood that Twitter users will retweet and like tweets from the companies.FindingsThe findings highlight the importance of aspirational talk and engaging users in CSR messages. Furthermore, the study revealed that the companies and brands on Twitter that tweeted more frequently about CSR were associated with higher overall levels of content diffusion and endorsement.Originality/valueThis study provides important insights into key aspects of communicating about CSR issues on social networking sites such as Twitter and makes several practical recommendations for companies.

Emotional Self-Disclosure in Online Breast Cancer Support Groups: Examining Theme, Reciprocity, and Linguistic Style Matching

ABSTRACTThe present study investigated emotional self-disclosure (ESD) patterns and their effects in online support groups specific to different stages of breast cancer. Linguistic features of messages posted to an online breast cancer support group were analyzed. ESD was common, and was consistent across four stage forums. Emotional talk was linked to a variety of themes, but most prominently in the context of discussions about social connections rather than health or death. Linguistic style matching mediated the relationship between ESD in posts and reciprocal ESD in comments, suggesting a key role for mutual understanding and engagement between posters and commenters. Implications for health communication theory and practice were discussed.

Does emotional talk vary with fears of cancer recurrence trajectory? A content analysis of interactions between women with breast cancer and their therapeutic radiographers

Fears of cancer recurrence (FCR) in patients with breast cancer are hypothesised to develop over the period from diagnosis, through treatment and thereafter. A crucial point may be the contact that patients have with their therapeutic radiographer in review appointments. The study aimed to (1) describe and categorise the content of the identified emotional talk, and (2) consider the evidence for an association of content with FCR trajectory. MethodsA concurrent mixed methods approach was applied as part of a larger investigation (FORECAST) of breast cancer patients (n=87). Patients completed a daily diary during their radiotherapy treatment. Audio recordings were collected of review appointments. The Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequences (VR-CoDES) system was used to code patient emotional cues and concerns (CCs). Purposeful sampling of the daily diary ratings identified 12 patients (30 consultations) with an increasing (n=6) or decreasing (n=6) FCR trajectory. The emotional talk of these patients at their weekly reviews was content analysed. ResultsFour themes were identified from 185 CCs: Physical Symptoms, Factors External to Hospital, Treatment, and Labelling Cancer. FCR decreasing trajectory group consultations were longer (p<0.02), expressed twice as many CCs as the increasing trajectory group (p<0.001), and were more likely to refer to cancer directly (p<0.05). ConclusionsThe emotional content expressed matched features outlined in the Lee-Jones et al. (1997) FCR model, and showed evidence of avoidance in increasing FCR trajectory patients.

The relation between parents' mental state talk and children's social understanding: A meta‐analysis

AbstractThough there is empirical support for the relation between parents' mental state talk to children and children's social understanding, including false belief understanding (FBU) and emotion understanding (EU), effect sizes range widely. The current meta‐analysis focused on the relation between parents' mental state talk and children's social understanding and moderators of this relation: parents' mental state talk content (e.g., cognitive vs. emotion talk), quality (e.g., appropriate vs. inappropriate), and context (e.g., book vs. reminiscing). Data from 22 studies examining FBU and 18 examining EU were examined. Participants included 2,298 children (&lt;7 years). Analyses yielded a significant effect size for parents' mental state talk and children's FBU and EU. These relations were stronger under certain circumstances, particularly for children's FBU. For example, in terms of content, cognitive state talk was a stronger predictor of FBU and EU compared to talk about desires and emotions. For FBU, the strongest relations were present when parents' mental state talk was: (a) appropriate and explanatory compared to inappropriate and (b) in a book or self‐report context compared to reminiscing. The results of this study further refine the social constructivist view of social understanding and point to future avenues for research aimed at improving children's social understanding.

Shared understanding: Predicting home hospice nurse-cancer family caregiver communication similarity.

40 Background: In cancer home hospice, families provide 24/7 care with support from a nurse-led hospice team. Effective patient-caregiver-nurse communication can facilitate a “shared understanding,” resulting in better patient caregiver outcomes. Shared understanding may be evidenced by high similarity in language usage/meaning. Objective: Describe communication caregiver-nurse similarity (relatedness in word usage/meaning) in cancer home hospice using latent semantic analysis (LSA) and to identify nurse communication processes, confidence, and preferences that predict communication similarity. Methods: As part of a larger study, nurse home hospice visits to spouse cancer caregivers were audio recorded. Interaction analysis was used to quantify caregiver and nurse emotion talk, nurse partnering, and nurse dominance (ratio of total nurse/caregiver talk). Nurses completed questionnaires to capture preference for patient oriented care and confidence in their communication. Verbatim transcripts were analyzed using LSA, a tool that assesses the similarity of communication (range 0-1 where higher scores indicate greater similarity). Descriptive statistics and bivariate correlations were calculated. Results: 31 nurse-caregiver home hospice interactions were analyzed. Nurses were female, average age 44.03 (SD = 9.8), with an average 14.6 years experience. Spouse caregivers were 77% female, average age 64.7 (SD = 10.9). The average LSA score was .83 (range = .66-.89). Higher LSA values were significantly associated with more nurse partnering (r = .36, p = .05) and lower nurse dominance (r = -.39, p = .03), but not caregiver or nurse emotion talk (ps &gt; .05). Higher LSA values also predicted more nurse-reported preference for patient-oriented care (r = -.75, p &lt; .01) and lower nurse communication confidence (r = -.46, p = .01). Conclusions: Our findings suggest that hospice nurses who are more patient-oriented, listen to and encourage caregivers’ concerns are more likely to use concordant meaning and language usage in their home hospice visits. Further research should examine if a nurse’s use of language similarity strategies improve caregiver understanding, competency and satisfaction with care.

Thinking or feeling? An exploratory study of maternal scaffolding, child mental state talk, and emotion understanding in language-impaired and typically developing school-aged children.

Mother-child mental state talk (MST) supports children's developing social-emotional understanding. In typically developing (TD) children, family conversations about emotion, cognition, and causes have been linked to children's emotion understanding. Specific language impairment (SLI) may compromise developing emotion understanding and adjustment. We investigated emotion understanding in children with SLI and TD, in relation to mother-child conversation. Specifically, is cognitive, emotion, or causal MST more important for child emotion understanding and how might maternal scaffolding support this? Nine 5- to 9-year-old children with SLI and nine age-matched typically developing (TD) children, and their mothers. We assessed children's language, emotion understanding and reported behavioural adjustment. Mother-child conversations were coded for MST, including emotion, cognition, and causal talk, and for scaffolding of causal talk. Children with SLI scored lower than TD children on emotion understanding and adjustment. Mothers in each group provided similar amounts of cognitive, emotion, and causal talk, but SLI children used proportionally less cognitive and causal talk than TD children did, and more such child talk predicted better child emotion understanding. Child emotion talk did not differ between groups and did not predict emotion understanding. Both groups participated in maternal-scaffolded causal talk, but causal talk about emotion was more frequent in TD children, and such talk predicted higher emotion understanding. Cognitive and causal language scaffolded by mothers provides tools for articulating increasingly complex ideas about emotion, predicting children's emotion understanding. Our study provides a robust method for studying scaffolding processes for understanding causes of emotion.

Communication among cancer patients, caregivers, and hospice nurses: Content, process and change over time

ObjectiveFirst, to describe communication of home hospice nurse visits to cancer patient-caregiver dyads. Second, to assess change in communication related to domains of care over the course of visits. MethodsMulti-site prospective observational longitudinal study of audio-recorded home hospice visits (N=537 visits; 101 patient-caregiver dyads; 58 nurses). Communication was coded using the Roter Interaction Analysis System to describe content and process. Conversation representing three care domains (physical, psychosocial/daily life, and emotional) was calculated from RIAS categories across speakers and analyzed to assess change in communication over time. ResultsOn average, nurses spoke 54% of total utterances, caregivers 29%, and patients 17%. For all participants, the predominant conversational focus was on physical care. Linear mixed effects models indicated that combined participant emotional talk showed a small systematic decrease over time; however, the results for all domains indicated variability unexplained by time or speaker effects. ConclusionsHome hospice conversations are predominantly focused on physical care. Systematic change in communication versus responsiveness to the dynamic effects of patient death and family response over time are discussed. Practice implicationsCommunication strategies already in use by hospice nurses could be leveraged and expanded upon to better facilitate family competence and confidence.

‘Show me your mad faces!’ preschool teachers’ emotion talk in the classroom

ABSTRACTEmotion talk plays an important role in the social and emotional development of preschoolers, but not much work has shown how teachers talk about emotions in the classroom. We recorded preschool teachers’ (N = 13) emotion talk in naturalistic observations. Teachers expressed 633 emotion-related utterances, about 3 per hour (range fewer than 1 to 11 per hour). Most utterances were comments, guides, or questions about emotions and referenced negative emotions. Explaining and questioning occurred during teacher-directed activities and when children were compliant in activities. Socializations and guides were common during child free play and when children acted aggressively. Findings suggest that teachers use both higher- and lower level emotion talk and that children’s behaviours may present opportunities to explain or directly instruct the expression of emotion. Overall emotion talk was infrequent and further research should consider ways to help teachers to capitalize on opportunities to introduce emotion talk in their classroom.