Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 119 (2014) 26–39

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Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp

Enhancing social cognition by training children in emotion understanding: A primary school study Veronica Ornaghi a,⇑, Jens Brockmeier b, Ilaria Grazzani a a b

Department of Human Sciences, University of Milano–Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 21 February 2013 Revised 9 October 2013 Available online 23 November 2013 Keywords: Emotion understanding Theory of mind Conversation on emotions Empathy Intervention study Primary school Social cognition

a b s t r a c t We investigated whether training school-age children in emotion understanding had a significant effect on their social cognition. Participants were 110 children (mean age = 7 years 3 months) assigned to training and control conditions. Over a 2-month intervention program, after the reading of illustrated scenarios based on emotional scripts, the training group was engaged in conversations on emotion understanding, whereas the control group was simply asked to produce a drawing about the story. The training group outperformed the control group on emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, and the positive training outcomes for emotion understanding remained stable over 6 months. Implications of the findings are discussed. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Our study follows in the well-established line of inquiry into the development of social cognition (Hughes, 2011), an area that includes children’s theory of mind (ToM), empathy, and emotion understanding (EU). Specifically, we set out to investigate how training primary school children in EU using a conversational approach might affect their later social cognition. Recent studies on social understanding have increasingly focused on the primary school years (Miller, 2012), highlighting the continued development of social cognitive and meta-reflexive abilities throughout this period. In particular, during middle childhood, key changes may be observed in a range of social cognition skills, including advanced ToM, empathy, and mastery of the more complex components of emotion comprehension.

⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (V. Ornaghi). 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2013.10.005

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Our work was informed by the view that the identification of factors or procedures predicting successful developmental paths can play a crucial role in preventing maladaptation and negative outcomes. In this regard, there has been a shift during recent years from repairing weaknesses and disease during childhood to preempting problems by promoting children’s socioemotional and cognitive competence. It is implicit in such a perspective that interventions should be designed not only to address deficits but also to foster positive behaviors and strengths (Denham, Wyatt, Bassett, Echeverria, & Knox, 2009). Training children’s social cognition Numerous training studies have reported positive outcomes for children’s social cognition. Most of the research on gains in ToM has drawn on the conversation paradigm introduced by Appleton and Reddy (1996). These authors conducted a study with 3-year-old children who, after being trained in explaining the thoughts and actions of characters in videos, outperformed control group participants on a standard false belief task. Similarly, Guajardo and Watson (2002) manipulated 3- and 4-year-olds’ exposure to social discourse centered naturalistically around children’s storybooks, examining the implications for theory of mind. The results supported the hypothesis that social discourse influences children’s theory of mind. Adopting a similar method, Lohmann and Tomasello (2003) showed that discourse interaction using mental state verbs improved preschool children’s social cognition, with the best intervention outcomes being obtained when two factors were combined: presentation of a series of objects, some of which had a misleading appearance (i.e., initially looking like one thing but turning out to be something else) and verbal comments on what people would say, think, and know about the perceptible properties and actual identity of these objects. More recently, improvements in ToM were also found by Veneziano, Hudelot, Albert, and Veyrier (2008) and by Ornaghi, Brockmeier, and Grazzani Gavazzi (2011), whose experimental group children took part in conversations on mental states. Finally, within the same conversational paradigm, Aram, Fine, and Ziv (2013) established the efficacy of an intervention with preschoolers in which parents were given guidelines for the interactive reading of four books with their children, including discussion of sociocognitive aspects of the stories such as mental terms and mental causality. It is to be noted that the majority of the reviewed studies were conducted with preschoolers, whereas there is a lack of this kind of research with children of school age and older. Empathy, the second component of social cognition examined in our study, is a complex construct and a specific social cognitive ability related to taking part in the suffering of other people (Hoffman, 2000). More specifically, empathy is made up of a cognitive dimension involving the capacity to see things from the perspective of others and an affective dimension that involves sharing other people’s emotions, as in the case of emotional contagion. As shown by Strayer (1993), school-age children begin to comprehend, for example, that their sadness may be an emotional reaction to something that has happened to another person and not to them or that their fear can be elicited by the account of a threatening event that happened to someone else. As far as we are aware, few studies have used specific training procedures to enhance the development of empathy in children (apart from recent research on the prevention of bullying such as Sßahin, 2012). The small body of work in this direction includes a study by Goldstein and Winner (2012) with children and adolescents, where the use of an active paradigm (role-playing) to train participants led to gains in empathy and ToM. In addition, Schonert-Reichl, Smith, Zaidman-Zait, and Hertzman (2012) examined the effects of a program aimed at enhancing empathy in 7- and 8-year-old children, finding a positive impact on their socioemotional development. With regard to the third aspect of social cognition investigated here, few studies have examined the effects of training interventions on children’s emotion understanding. An early contribution was provided by Bennett and Hiscock (1993), who used a paradigm based on watching videos to improve children’s understanding of conflicting emotions. Peng, Johnson, Pollock, Glasspool, and Hams (1992) concentrated on children’s understanding of ambivalent emotion. Participants in a training group were asked to consider a story character’s emotional state in relation to the positive and negative components of a conflictual event immediately after it had been recounted and again at the end of the story. Children in the control group were invited to identify the character’s emotional reaction only

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at the end of the story. The training intervention was successful with children as young as 6 or 7 years, who more accurately identified mixed emotional reactions than their peers in the control group; in contrast, preschoolers showed little benefit from the training sessions. Pons, Harris, and Doudin (2002) conducted a training program aimed at helping 9-year-old children to develop their overall comprehension of emotion. The level of EU in the experimental group had improved significantly after the 3-month intervention. Finally, in a study by Tenenbaum, Alfieri, Brooks, and Dunne (2008), children between 5 and 8 years of age either explained (self-explanation condition) or listened to an experimenter explaining (experimenter explanation condition) the causes of story characters’ hidden and ambivalent emotional reactions in nine different situations. Compared with a control group whose members listened to the story scenarios and answered questions unrelated to emotions, school-age children in both experimental conditions displayed gains in EU. The last mentioned study was based on the developmental model proposed by Pons and Harris (2005) that also informed our own research. This model, resulting from several studies introduced by the pioneering work carried out by Harris (1983), has been confirmed by a substantial body of findings (e.g., Tenenbaum, Visscher, Pons, & Harris, 2004), including those of our own research group (Ornaghi & Grazzani, 2013). It is made up of nine components grouped into three categories: understanding of the nature of emotion (two components: recognition of basic emotions and understanding of mixed emotions), understanding of the causes of emotion (five components: the role of external causes, memory, desires, false beliefs, and moral values), and understanding that emotion may be controlled (two components: the distinction between apparent and felt emotions—or hidden emotions— and awareness that emotional experience may be regulated). These nine components may also be assigned to three developmental levels of EU that Pons and Harris conventionally labeled external (attained from around 3 or 4 years of age and including recognition of facial expressions, understanding of how situational causes affect emotions, and appreciation of the role of desires in emotions), mental (attained from around 6 years of age and including understanding of the role of beliefs in emotions, the impact of memory on emotions, and the distinction between outwardly expressed and privately felt emotions), and reflective (attained from around 8 years of age and including the effect of morality on emotions, awareness that emotions may be regulated through cognitive control strategies, and appreciation of concurrent mixed feelings). The authors also designed a Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons, Harris, & de Rosnay, 2004) to evaluate emotion understanding in 3- to 11-year-old children and to monitor their progress through the three developmental landmarks (external, mental, and reflective levels of emotion comprehension). The conversation paradigm Numerous authors have underlined that an important factor contributing to children’s development of emotion understanding and theory of mind is their participation in everyday conversation (e.g., Tenenbaum et al., 2008), viewed as an advanced form of social interaction intertwining social cognition with mutual understanding of emotions. In the current study, we ourselves adopted a conversational approach (Siegal, 1999) because it reflects the social constructionist perspective underpinning our research program. In this perspective, from their first inter-subjective experiences onward, children are involved in conversational interactions that draw them into social life, allow them to share and reflect on their experience, and improve their awareness that people often adopt differing perspectives on the same situation (Nelson, 2007). In the course of childhood, conversational activities, such as explaining mental states and discussing them with other people, essentially contribute to children’s understanding of the mind (de Rosnay & Hughes, 2006; Turnbull & Carpendale, 1999), helping them to transform their implicit knowledge into explicit awareness (Vygotsky, 1962). In line with this view, we ourselves claim a pivotal role for linguistic interaction in the development of ToM and EU skills (Ornaghi et al., 2011), arguing that individuals construct and reconstruct their understanding of the meaning of words and expressions by drawing on the way these terms are used in conversation and other everyday pragmatic activities (Tomasello, 2009). The argument that discourse interaction and participation in conversation contribute to children’s understanding of mental states and false beliefs draws on extensive research using both longitudinal methods (Ensor & Hughes, 2008; Peterson & Siegal, 2000; Turnbull, Carpendale, & Racine, 2009) and training methods, as outlined

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above. Nonetheless, in the training studies aimed at enhancing EU, the conversational approach has not been extensively used to date. The current study This study offers a number of original features with respect to the existing literature. First, while following in the established line of inquiry into training emotion understanding, we set out to investigate whether the intervention program implemented had an effect not only on EU abilities (an aspect previously evaluated in other training studies as outlined above) but also on ToM and empathy. Specifically, given that all three constructs are based on the same underlying skills (perspective taking, recognizing emotional states, linking internal emotions with manifest behavior, etc.), we hypothesized that strengthening one of these abilities (namely EU) would lead to significant gains in the other two abilities. Second, the training intervention was designed to target all three categories of emotion understanding (comprehension of the nature, causes, and regulation of emotion). In contrast, in the training studies carried out by Pons and colleagues (2002) and by Tenenbaum and colleagues (2008), although the same developmental model and assessment measure were used, the training focused only on selected components of EU and the outcome was analyzed in terms of changes in overall EU only, without examining the training effect on individual categories of emotion comprehension. Third, our data analysis assessed the changes brought about by the intervention as a function of the developmental levels of EU proposed by Pons and Harris in their model. Thus, the study had the following aims: (a) to examine whether training primary school children in EU through a conversational procedure would improve their performance on emotion comprehension itself, theory-of-mind tasks, and empathy scales with respect to the scores of a control group and (b) to verify the stability over time of the training effect on some of the variables under study. As a result of our training intervention, we expected that the training group would outperform the control group on the administered measures and that this effect would last over time. In addition, given that most of the existing research on the development of social cognition has not identified significant gender differences, we did not expect our results to vary as a function of gender. Method Participants The study sample comprised 110 children (55 girls and 55 boys) whose ages at pretest ranged from 6 years 9 months to 7 years 11 months (M = 7 years 3 months, SD = 3.4 months). All participants were typically developing children with no psychological, behavioral, or language problems. They were in second grade at primary school, came from middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds, and were native Italian speakers. Children were quasi-randomly assigned to two groups: a training group (n = 52, 28 girls and 24 boys) and a control group (n = 58, 27 girls and 31 boys). A series of analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were run to compare children’s performances at pretest as a function of group condition (the tests used are described in the section outlining the instruments). No significant differences emerged between the experimental and control groups: age, F(1, 95) = 0.36, ns, false belief understanding battery, F(1, 106) = 0.45, ns, emotional lexicon comprehension, F(1, 106) = 0.04, ns, emotion understanding, F(1, 108) = 0.008, ns, and empathy, F(1, 107) = 0.10, ns. Research design and instruments The research consisted of four phases: pretest (T1), training, posttest (T2), and follow-up (T3). In Table 1, we present a summary of the different research phases, the instruments administered, and the specific forms of intervention implemented with the experimental and control groups. Training was initiated 2 weeks after the pretest phase ended. The intervention lasted 2 months, and the posttest phase took place starting 2 weeks from the end of the training. Finally, the follow-up phase began 6 months after the posttest had been concluded.

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Table 1 Summary of research phases as a function of group condition. Pretest (T1)

Intervention

Posttest (T2)

Follow-up (T3)

Training group

ELT (Emotional Lexicon Test) TEC (Test of Emotion Comprehension) FB Battery (false belief battery) HIF (How I Feel in Different Situations)

Reading of brief scenarios based on emotional scripts Conversational training on the nature, causes, and regulation of emotions

ELT (Emotional Lexicon Test) TEC (Test of Emotion Comprehension) FB Battery (false belief battery) HIF (How I Feel in Different Situations)

TEC (Test of Emotion Comprehension)

Control group

The same instruments administered to the children in the training group

Reading of brief scenarios based on emotional scripts Drawing about the story they had just heard

The same instruments administered to the children in the training group

TEC (Test of Emotion Comprehension)

A series of standardized instruments were used to assess the variables under study, with the inclusion of an Emotional Lexicon Test to verify that none of the children displayed deficits in their comprehension of emotional state language and to evaluate the effect of conversational training on this ability. The emotion comprehension test, theory-of-mind battery, and empathy scale were selected on the basis that they are validated measures, well known, and particularly suited to the age group under study. Participants were pretested and posttested on all measures. During the follow-up phase, only the emotion understanding measure was repeated. All tests were administered individually in counterbalanced order. Emotional Lexicon Test The Emotional Lexicon Test (ELT; Grazzani, Ornaghi, & Piralli, 2011) is a test for children between 3 and 10 years of age designed to evaluate children’s comprehension of the emotional state lexicon. Each of the test’s 14 items presents a brief illustrated scenario. The first part of the test evaluates children’s understanding of the lexicon of basic emotions (7 items), and the second part evaluates their understanding of the lexicon of complex and sociomoral emotions (7 items). The researcher first reads aloud the short story, in which an external cause leads the protagonist to have an emotional experience. The child is then invited to indicate which of two emotional terms better describes the story character’s feelings and finally to justify his or her choice of term. Given the age of the participants in the current study, only the second part of the test was administered. A score of 0 was awarded if the child chose the emotional term that did not match the story character’s feelings or chose the correct term but failed to provide an appropriate explanation for the choice. Scores ranged from 0 to 7. Test of Emotion Comprehension In the current study, we used the standardized Italian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC; Pons & Harris, 2000) developed by Albanese and Molina (2008). This test evaluates comprehension of the nature, causes, and regulation of emotion in 3- to 11-year-old children as well as their developmental stage of EU in relation to the external, mental, and reflective levels described above (Pons et al., 2004). The first level is usually acquired at preschool age. Therefore, in this study with 7-year-olds, we took into account only the scores for the most advanced components of EU that are included in the mental and reflective levels. However, the test was administered in its entirety because the content of successive items is inter-related. The examiner reads a short story and shows the child four illustrated faces representing different emotional states. The child must indicate which of these faces best matches the emotion experienced by the story character. Children normally receive a score of 1 for a correct answer on each of the nine components. However, in our analysis, we included the scores for only the six items assessing the more advanced components of EU. Thus, children could obtain total scores of 0 to 6. We also calculated partial scores for the mental and reflective levels, each ranging from 0 to 3.

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False belief understanding battery Participants were assessed on two second-order false belief prediction tasks, the look-prediction task and the say-prediction task (Liverta Sempio, Marchetti, Castelli, Lecciso, & Pezzotta, 2005), and a translated and adapted version of the false belief explanation task (Peskin & Astington, 2004). In the look-prediction test, the child is asked to predict where the protagonist of a story thinks that another story character will look for an object; in the say-prediction test, the child is asked to predict what the protagonist thinks another character will say about a gift he is to receive for his birthday. For each of the two tasks, the child was asked two control questions to ensure that he or she understood the story, a first-order question and a second-order question, and finally was invited to justify his or her response. In the explanation test, the child is presented with four brief illustrated stories and is asked to explain how the behavior or feelings of a story character in each scenario are based on a false belief. The three false belief tasks were administered in counterbalanced order. A conservative scoring criterion was adopted for each of the two second-order prediction tasks. Specifically, a score of 1 was awarded only if children both provided a correct response to the second-order question and justified their answer appropriately, with a score of 0 being awarded in all other cases. With regard to the scoring of the explanation task, for each story children were assigned a score of 1 if they spontaneously provided a correct response that made appropriate reference to the mental state of the story character, 0.5 if they provided an appropriate response after prompting, and 0 if they continued to answer inappropriately even after prompting (maximum score = 4). In addition, an aggregate score for the false belief battery was calculated for each participant by summing the scores for each of the three tasks (maximum score = 6). How I Feel in Different Situations The How I Feel in Different Situations test (HIFDS; Feshbach, Caprara, Lo Coco, Pastorelli, & Manna, 1991), administered here in the Italian version validated by Bonino, Lo Coco, and Tani (1998), assesses empathy in children and preadolescents. It is a 12-item self-report questionnaire made up of two subscales measuring the affective (e.g., ‘‘When somebody tells me a nice story, I feel as if the story is happening to me’’) and cognitive (e.g., ‘‘I can sense how my friends feel from the way they behave’’) dimensions of empathy. The 12 items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from never true (score of 1) to always true (score of 4). The HIFDS test, therefore, yields a total empathy score (maximum = 48) as well as partial scores for the affective (maximum score = 28) and cognitive (maximum score = 20) dimensions. Intervention procedure Two weeks after the conclusion of the pretest phase, a 2-month intervention took place. The children participating in the study attended a total of 15 1-h sessions held twice-weekly in small groups (5 or 6 children/group). Each session was divided into two parts (see Appendix for a sample intervention session for both the training and control conditions). First, children were read a short scenario or an emotional script presenting a prototypical everyday life situation with emotional connotations (e.g., receiving a desired present, watching a film, having an argument with someone). Following this, children in the experimental condition took part in conversation activities guided by a researcher; they were prompted to contribute to these structured conversations by recounting and sharing their own experiences and thoughts in relation to the target emotion. In contrast, after listening to the same story script, children in the control group were asked to produce a drawing about the story that they had just listened to without engaging in any conversational exchange about it. The control group activity was deliberately chosen to prevent children from conversing and as an age-appropriate alternative to the free play generally used with control groups in studies with preschoolers (see, e.g., Grazzani & Ornaghi, 2011). The training activities were designed on the basis of the theoretical model of EU outlined in the Introduction and focused on five emotions: four basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, and sadness) and one moral emotion (guilt). These emotions were chosen because children’s understanding of them is assessed by the TEC and because they are the emotions most commonly experienced in everyday life. Three training sessions were devoted to each of the five target emotions; at a first session children

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were trained in understanding the nature of the target emotion, at a second encounter they were trained in understanding its causes, and at a third session they were trained in understanding that it is possible to regulate this emotion. In the experimental condition, children were encouraged to converse with their peers about the nature, causes, and regulation of emotions, drawing on their own personal experience. The training sessions aimed at developing understanding of the nature of emotions consisted of presentation of the brief scenario followed by stimulus questions on two main aspects: recognition of the target emotions when expressed by self and others and awareness of the possibility that individuals may experience mixed emotions. The training sessions focused on the causes of emotions involved presentation of the emotional scenario followed by guided discussion of the different kinds of causes (external and internal) giving rise to the target emotions. Finally, training sessions aimed at raising awareness of the regulation of emotions again began with presentation of an emotional script, after which children were prompted to reflect on and converse about emotion regulation strategies. Results The Results section is divided into three subsections outlining descriptive statistics for the study measures, the impact of the intervention on children’s social cognition, and the stability of the training effect over time. Descriptive statistics Statistical analyses were conducted using SPSS (Version 21). Table 2 shows means and standard deviations for all variables (age in months, emotional state lexicon, emotion understanding, false belief understanding, and empathy) as a function of group condition at both pre- and posttest. Testing effect of training on children’s social cognition A repeated measure multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was run with the factors time (pretest vs. posttest), group condition (training vs. control), and gender (boys vs. girls) as the independent variables. Specifically, time was a within-participant variable, whereas group condition and gender were between-participant variables. Scores for emotional state lexicon, emotion understanding, false belief understanding, and empathy were the dependent variables. Effect sizes were calculated using partial eta-square (g2p ). A significant effect of time, Wilks’ k = .42, F(4, 99) = 32.45, p = .000001, g2p ¼ :57, and a significant Time  Group Condition interaction, Wilks’ k = .82, F(4, 99) = 5.20, p = .001, g2p ¼ :18, emerged from Table 2 Pre- and posttest means and standard deviations for all variables by group condition. Pretest

Age in months Emotional state lexicon EU total EU mental level EU reflective level False belief understanding Empathy total Empathy affective dimension Empathy cognitive dimension

Posttest

Training

Control

Training

Control

88.27 (3.29) 5.82 (1.08)c 4.04 (1.28)c 2.27 (0.81)c 1.77 (0.85)c 3.69 (1.32)c 31.22 (6.23)c 18.02 (4.24) 13.22 (2.65)c

88.69 (2.95) 5.79 (1.17)c 4.02 (1.22)c 2.34 (0.86)c 1.67 (0.88) 3.50 (1.30)c 31.51 (4.87) 17.90 (3.80) 13.61 (2.21)

93.27 (3.92) 6.66 (0.53)a,d 5.38 (0.82)a,d 2.86 (0.34)d 2.52 (0.69)a,d 5.02 (1.02)a,d 32.25 (5.96)d 18.10 (4.25) 14.20 (3.19)d

93.69 (2.95) 6.32 (0.68)b,d 4.53 (1.24)b,d 2.65 (0.71)d 1.87 (0.79)b 4.20 (1.19)b,d 31.46 (4.87) 17.86 (3.80) 13.58 (2.20)

Note: Standard deviations are in parentheses. The average values marked with the superscripts ‘‘a’’ through ‘‘d’’ were found to be statistically significant on application of a post hoc Bonferroni correction for all measures. The letters ‘‘a’’ and ‘‘b’’ denote the comparisons between the experimental and control groups for each of the pre- and posttest measures; the letters ‘‘c’’ and ‘‘d’’ indicate comparisons between pre- and posttest scores for the training and control groups, respectively.

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this preliminary analysis. Given that gender was not found to have any significant interactive effect at this stage, it was omitted from all subsequent analyses. The univariate tests revealed that the Time  Group Condition interaction was significant for emotion comprehension, F(1, 99) = 9.83, p = .001, g2p ¼ :11, false belief understanding, F(1, 99) = 3.71, p = .03, g2p ¼ :04, and empathy, F(1, 99) = 15.92, p = .01, g2p ¼ :06. The interaction between group condition and time factors was broken down into the simple main effects, applying a Bonferroni correction for multiple contrasts. For the group condition factor, the differences between training and control groups were analyzed at both the pre- and posttest stages. Calculation of the main effect did not yield any significant differences between the two groups at the pretest stage. At the posttest, there were statistically significant differences between the two groups regarding emotional lexicon, F(1, 108) = 8.23, p = .005, g2p ¼ :07, emotion understanding, F(1, 108) = 17.44, p = .0001, g2p ¼ :14, and false belief understanding, F(1, 108) = 14.83, p = .0002, g2p ¼ :12. Specifically, children in the training group obtained higher scores on these measures than children in the control group (see Table 2). With regard to the simple main effects for the time factor, the differences between pre- and posttest scores were analyzed for each of the two groups. Significant differences between pre- and posttest scores were found for both the training group, Wilks’ k = .35, F(4, 50) = 22.25, p = .00001, g2p ¼ :65, and the control group, Wilks’ k = .56, F(4, 51) = 9.44, p = .0001, g2p ¼ :44 (see Table 2). Separate analyses were carried out to investigate the efficacy of the intervention on each of the two developmental levels of emotion comprehension and the two dimensions of empathy. With regard to the levels of EU as measured by the TEC, a significant effect of time emerged for both the mental level, Wilks’ k = .76, F(1, 108) = 34.30, p = .000001, g2p ¼ :24, and the reflective level, Wilks’ k = .79, F(1, 108) = 27.87, p = .000001, g2p ¼ :20. There was also a significant Time  Group Condition interaction for the reflective level, Wilks’ k = .92, F(1, 108) = 8.98, p = .003, g2p ¼ :07, and a nearly significant interaction for the mental level, Wilks’ k = .96, F(1, 108) = 3.41, p = .06, g2p ¼ :03. The Time  Group Condition interaction effect was then broken down into the simple main effects. For the group condition factor, there were no significant differences between the two groups at pretest. At posttest, as shown in Table 2, children in the training group obtained significantly higher scores for the reflective level, F(1, 108) = 19.83, p = .00002, g2p ¼ :15, and significantly higher scores for the mental level of EU, F(1, 108) = 3.72, p = .05, g2p ¼ :03. For the time factor, there were significant differences between pre- and posttest scores for the mental level of EU in both the training group, F(1, 50) = 30.88, p = .000001, g2p ¼ :38, and the control group, F(1, 56) = 7.88, p = .007, gp2 ¼ :12. However, with regard to the reflective level, the difference between pre- and posttest scores was significant only in the training group, F(1, 50) = 34.09, p = .000001, g2p ¼ :40. Analysis of the pre- and posttest scores of both groups on the two dimensions of empathy (affective and cognitive) yielded statistically significant differences between the training and control groups for the cognitive dimension only. Specifically, there was again both a general significant effect of time, Wilks’ k = .96, F(1, 106) = 4.80, p = .03, g2p ¼ :04, and a significant Time  Group Condition interaction, Wilks’ k = .95, F(1, 106) = 4.48, p = .02, g2p ¼ :05. The pretest to posttest improvement was higher in the training group than in the control group. With regard to this interaction, the simple main effects for the time factor showed significant differences between pre- and posttest scores on the cognitive subscale of empathy in the training group only, F(1, 50) = 4.62, p = .03, g2p ¼ :08. The simple main effect for the group condition factor showed no significant differences between the groups at the pre- and posttest stages (see Table 2). Stability of the training effect over time At follow-up (T3), children in the experimental group obtained a mean overall TEC score of 0.54 (SD = 0.82) and mean scores on the mental and reflective components of 2.90 (SD = 0.30) and 2.63 (SD = 0.48), respectively. The control group participants obtained a mean overall score of 4.65 (SD = 1.05) and scores on the mental and reflective components of 2.74 (SD = 0.55) and 2.00 (SD = 0.72), respectively. On comparing children’s scores at T3, we found that the training group had performed significantly better than the control group with regard to both the overall TEC score, F(1, 108) = 28.16, p = .000001,

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Fig. 1. Performances at pretest, posttest, and follow-up for the reflective level of EU as a function of group condition.

and the score for the reflective component, F(1, 108) = 28.36, p = .000001. Regarding the mental component, a tendency toward statistical significance was identified at follow-up, F(1, 108) = 3.61, p = .06, a similar outcome to that found at posttest (T2). To verify the stability of the training effect on children’s total TEC score and partial scores for the mental and reflective levels, we calculated Cohen’s d and effect size correlations at both T2 and T3. Concerning overall performance on the TEC, the effect size identified at posttest, Cohen’s d = 0.80, effect size r = .37, was found to have remained stable at follow-up, Cohen’s d = 1.03, effect size r = .46. As shown in Fig. 1, scores for the reflective level of EU also displayed a stable effect size across the posttest, Cohen’s d = 0.86, effect size r = .39, and follow-up phases, Cohen’s d = 1.02, effect size r = .45.

Discussion The current study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a conversational intervention on emotions aimed at increasing not only children’s emotion understanding abilities but also their theory of mind and empathy. We obtained two main findings. First of all, regarding the positive effects of the training, the participants showed significant gains in their emotion understanding, theory of mind, and empathy. This is one of the first studies to report an intervention that was designed to enhance emotion understanding but also produced an effect on other areas of social cognition. Second, by examining change over time, we found that the positive effect on emotion comprehension had remained stable 6 months later. We discuss these findings in turn. Trained participants showed significant gains in their emotion understanding, particularly in relation to the reflective level of emotion understanding, which includes comprehension of the more complex components such as the effect of morality on emotions, awareness that emotions may be regulated through cognitive control strategies, and appreciation of concurrent mixed feelings (Pons et al., 2004). The improvement ensuing on training in reflective emotion understanding was all the more evident because children had obtained lower pretest scores on the reflective level of the TEC than on the mental level. Thus, it appears that the conversational intervention focused on this more advanced level of emotion understanding was particularly effective because it matched children’s zone of proximal development. Moreover, participants in the training group displayed enhanced performance on second-order false belief tasks, which previous research (e.g., Grazzani & Ornaghi, 2012) has confirmed remains challenging even at 7 years of age and older (see also Pons & Harris, 2005). The collaborative nature of the group conversations that formed the backbone of the training may have helped children to engage in the higher level of reasoning and mentalization required for success on second-order false

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belief tasks, again an ability that lay within their zone of proximal development (Dunn, 2006). These findings, therefore, may throw new light on the development of this important aspect of ToM. Our results also confirm the hypothesis that gains in emotion understanding may lead to a corresponding improvement in empathic abilities, which in turn may be expected to promote socioemotional outcomes. Participants displayed significant gains in the cognitive component of the empathy construct, which involves empathic awareness and understanding and is assessed with items such as ‘‘I can tell when my parents are worried about me even when they don’t say so’’ and ‘‘I can sense how my friends feel by how they behave’’ (Feshbach et al., 1991). In this sense, we may surmise that the conversational activities stimulated children to recognize signals and behaviors in others that may be explained by what they are feeling inside (see Appendix). No significant differences were found between the groups for the affective component of empathy. This may be due to the fact that the metacognitive nature of the training promoted the development of the cognitive dimension of empathy more strongly than the affective dimension and/or emotional contagion (e.g., ‘‘When I see someone crying, I feel like crying too’’). With regard to the second outcome concerning the persistence of training effects over time, as far as we know, this is one of the few studies reporting follow-up assessment of training benefits. We found that the training effect on emotion understanding had remained stable 6 months later. This finding is noteworthy given that the schoolteachers had not been trained to continue to implement the activities and methods used in the intervention. Therefore, we may conjecture that the children themselves, thanks to their increased awareness of the theme of ‘‘emotion’’ and willingness to discuss it with their peers, transferred these abilities to everyday life situations at home and at school, thereby consolidating the gain over time. In addition to these two main outcomes, we found no significant differences as a result of training regarding performance on the test of emotional lexicon, possibly due to a ceiling effect given that mean pretest scores were already very high (Table 2). However, this measure was included in the research design mainly to verify at the initial stages of the study that no children displayed deficits in their knowledge and comprehension of emotional state language. Moreover, as expected, we did not find the results to vary as a function of gender, confirming empirical findings in this field of research (Pons et al., 2002; Tenenbaum et al., 2008). Role of conversation The training activities implemented were inspired by the developmental model of emotion understanding outlined above and based on a conversational procedure that we believe to have led to the positive outcomes obtained. Effective use of this kind of procedure has been reported in recent studies (e.g., Grazzani & Ornaghi, 2011; Ziv, Smadja, & Aram, 2013), confirming findings obtained previously by Tenenbaum and colleagues (2008). Although the last-mentioned authors were among the first to successfully test the usefulness of conversational interventions in enhancing emotion understanding, they did not evaluate other social cognition outcomes. In contrast, we explored the effect of our training not only on the targeted emotion understanding abilities but also on false belief understanding and the cognitive aspects of empathy. How may we interpret these findings? We believe that the conversational approach favored both an exchange of viewpoints among participants and reflection on the bidirectional link between manifest behavior and the individual’s internal world (cognition, emotion, intentions, etc.). Specifically, the procedure prompted children to think about the mental states of others, to share in the emotions of others, and to compare the emotional states of others with their own. The abilities relied on by each of the three constructs were all exercised during the intervention, although the method was primarily designed to enhance understanding of the nature, causes, and regulation of emotion. The training activities were designed to maximize conversational exchange among children, as illustrated in the following extract from a session exploring the regulation of sadness drawn from our corpus of audio- and video-recorded data: Adult: In the situation I just told you about, the protagonist feels very sad. When you feel very sad, what do you do to make yourselves feel better?

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B: When I’m sad, I go to my Mom or I stay by myself or I go play with my sister and I just leave it; sometimes I sit down somewhere. Adult: And do the rest of you do the same? Children: No. . . . K: When I’m sad, I play with the Wii, I play with the sponge ball. A: When I’m sad, I play with the Xbox, I watch TV, or I shut myself in my room. G: I do the same as you guys, that way I don’t think about it and I forget about it. B: But I can’t forget about it. . . . G: I forget about it, but when other things happen to me I remember it and I feel a bit sad again. A: Me too. B: Me too, but then when my Mom hugs me I feel better. Interestingly, this example demonstrates that children learn about emotions not only by hearing others tell stories about emotional situations but also through their own contributions to the discussion and conversation.

Conclusions, limitations, and educational implications This study contributes to the knowledge of relations among emotion comprehension, theory of mind, and empathy, showing that enhancing children’s emotion understanding may facilitate both the development of ToM and the cognitive dimension of empathy. This is an important finding because we know that well-developed social cognition abilities enhance children’s social competence and quality of life (e.g., Denham, 2006). Nevertheless, our research presents some limitations. First, only a limited amount of time was available to us for the follow-up phase of the research; therefore, we were able to repeat only the TEC. Although the results obtained at T3 with respect to the emotion understanding measure are encouraging, we are lacking a picture of how the children might have performed on the other measures compared with the earlier phases of the research. Second, the empathy scale may be considered only a limited measure of the socioemotional benefits of the training; it would need to be supplemented by observational and ecologically valid data of the spontaneous empathic or prosocial behavior of individual children in interaction with their peers. This was not possible due to the constraints imposed by the primary school educational context, in which there is a strong emphasis on formal didactics and learning (in contrast to other educational contexts such as infant school). Furthermore, we chose not to avail of the teachers’ observations of the children because we presumed that their awareness of the types of intervention carried out with the children and the expected outcomes might have induced a social desirability effect. Despite these limitations, our findings point up the unequivocal usefulness of conversational activities in improving children’s cognitive and socioemotional competences in educational contexts. We conclude that teachers and educators can play a crucial role in facilitating the development of children’s social understanding, a role that remains to be fully delineated in the course of future research.

Acknowledgments This research was funded by a MIUR (Italian Ministry for Education, University, and Research) grant awarded to Ilaria Grazzani (PRIN 2008, Protocol 20089K8SA5_003). Preliminary results were presented at the 2012 NIL (Narrative, Intervention, and Literacy) International Conference, Sorbonne University, Paris. We thank Clare O’Sullivan for her help with the translation, Alessandro Pepe for his supervision of the statistical analyses, and Francesca Piralli and Elisa Cherubin for their vital contribution to the data collection. We are also grateful to the children who participated in this research, their teachers who gave so generously of their time, and two anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions.

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Appendix Sample intervention in both training and control conditions Target emotion: anger Aim: facilitating more advanced understanding of the emotion 1. The researcher read the following brief illustrated scenario: ‘‘Today is Maria’s birthday, and her Mum has promised to take her to the cinema after school. Maria can’t wait. Unfortunately, however, when Maria’s Mum comes to pick her up at school, she tells Maria that she can’t take her to the movies because she has to work. This makes Maria angry.’’ 2. Children’s activities after listening to the brief story. Training condition (conversation). Researcher: Today we’re going to talk about anger, about what makes people angry. What happened to Maria in the story I just told you? B: She was angry because her Mum had promised to take her to the cinema but in the end she didn’t take her. Researcher: Exactly. Today we’re going to talk precisely about this—about the causes of anger. Now, can each of you tell the others what things make you angriest? F: I get angry when my sister takes my favorite doll. D: My sister always does that too. She does it on purpose to make me mad. A: I get angry when somebody makes fun of me. My brother always makes fun of me. B: And what does he say to you? A: That I’m a sponge. Researcher: That’s right, how does a person feel when other people make fun of them? F: They get mad. B: And it’s sad too because maybe they feel embarrassed in front of the other people. E: I get mad when I want to play with a friend and that friend wants to play with another girl. Researcher: That’s right. Anything else? B: When someone does something and then they blame you, but you haven’t got anything to do with it. For example, yesterday my sister pulled my hair and she made me dirty. Mum blamed me and she said; ‘‘[B], you always get dirty.’’ I tried to explain to Mum what had happened, but my sister makes terrible scenes; she cries really hard, and Mum always believes her. Researcher: And that makes you very angry? B: Yes, because it’s unfair. D: You could put up a video-camera that records what Viola does; that way, your Mum would believe you because she’d see the truth. Researcher: Well done. Any other reasons for feeling angry? F: When somebody breaks something that belongs to you. Once my friend broke my computer game. I was really mad. Researcher: I’m sure you were. Or another reason for being angry could be this—when you don’t get what you want. B: Like Maria in the story you read earlier. N: It’s true. I wanted a Barbie that I had seen in a shop, but my Mom didn’t buy it more me and I got a bit angry. G: I get mad when people play mean tricks on me. My sister knows I’m afraid of the dark, and when I go to the bathroom she always turns off the light. Researcher: I get mad when I don’t succeed in doing something even though I’ve tried and tried. R: Yes, me too. I was trying to draw a bear all day today, but I couldn’t manage to draw a proper one. I felt really annoyed . . . like tearing up the page. B: If you don’t calm down, you certainly won’t succeed in drawing it. B: Once I tried to download a game onto the computer. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t do it. I got mad and I said, ‘‘You stupid machine.’’

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Researcher: Really well done, children. So we can get mad over something with someone else or with ourselves. Children in chorus: Yes! Researcher: Anything else? C: I get angry when I get a bad mark. F: I cry when I get bad marks. I get sad because I’m afraid my Mom will scold me. B: Yes, but it’s not such a big deal. If you worked hard, it doesn’t matter. It can happen. I’d like to say something else. You can feel angry when, for example, someone, when you are speaking to another person, says, for example, ‘‘I can do lots more things than he can. I can write more neatly, I can go head over heels backward, etc.’’ And the other says ‘‘Wow, you’re so cool’’ and doesn’t listen to you anymore but listens to the other guy. And you think that he prefers to be with him. Researcher: Well done. You said think. Thinking something can sometimes make us have feelings. So the causes of anger are not always outside of us. Sometimes we can feel angry because we think, believe, or remember something. B: That’s right. I once saw [I] and [Z] muttering among themselves and looking at me and laughing, and I thought that they were saying bad things about me. Researcher: And they weren’t? B: No. But when I see two friends muttering, I suspect that they might be saying things about me. C: That’s true, me too. But sometimes it is true that [I] and [Z] say mean things about other people. Researcher: Good. Well done. Believing, thinking, suspecting, imagining . . . these are all activities of our mind that can cause emotions. You have said a lot of interesting things. We have discovered that lots of things make us angry, but that what makes one person angry will not necessarily make another person angry and that we can get angry on account of causes that are outside of ourselves but also on account of our thoughts and beliefs. Next time, we’ll talk about anger again, about how you can control and regulate it. Control condition (no conversation). The children were asked to produce an individual drawing on the short story just listened to. The activity was carried out in the context of art class. References Albanese, O., & Molina, P. (Eds.). (2008). Lo sviluppo della comprensione delle emozioni e la sua valutazione: La standardizzazione italiana del Test di Comprensione delle Emozioni (TEC) [The development of emotion comprehension: The Italian standardization of the TEC]. Milan, Italy: Unicopli. Appleton, M., & Reddy, V. (1996). Teaching three-year-olds to pass false belief tests: A conversational approach. Social Development, 5, 275–291. Aram, D., Fine, Y., & Ziv, M. (2013). Enhancing parent–child shared book reading interactions: Promoting references to the book’s plot and socio-cognitive themes. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28, 111–122. Bennett, M., & Hiscock, J. (1993). Children’s understanding of conflicting emotions: A training study. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 154, 515–523. Bonino, S., Lo Coco, A., & Tani, F. (1998). Empatia [Empathy]. Florence, Italy: Giunti. de Rosnay, M., & Hughes, C. (2006). Conversation and theory of mind: Do children talk their way to social–cognitive understanding? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 7–37. Denham, S. A. (2006). Social–emotional competence as support for school readiness: What is it and how do we assess it? Early Education and Development, 17, 57–89. Denham, S. A., Wyatt, T. M., Bassett, H. H., Echeverria, D., & Knox, S. S. (2009). Assessing socio-emotional development in children from a longitudinal perspective. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 63, 37–52. Dunn, J. (2006). A discussion of the Merrill–Palmer Quarterly special issue. Merrill–Palmer Quarterly, 52, 151–157. Ensor, R., & Hughes, C. (2008). Content or connectedness? Mother–child talk and early social understanding. Child Development, 79, 201–216. Feshbach, N., Caprara, G. V., Lo Coco, A., Pastorelli, C., & Manna, G. (1991). Empathy and its correlates: Cross cultural data from Italy. In: Paper presented at the 11th biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, Minneapolis, MN. Goldstein, T. R., & Winner, E. (2012). Enhancing empathy and theory of mind. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13, 19–37. Grazzani, I., & Ornaghi, V. (2011). Emotional state talk and emotion understanding: A training study with preschool children. Journal of Child Language, 38, 1124–1139. Grazzani, I., & Ornaghi, V. (2012). How do use and comprehension of mental-state language relate to theory of mind in middle childhood? Cognitive Development, 27, 99–111. Grazzani, I., Ornaghi, V., & Piralli, F. (2011). Teoria della mente e comprensione del lessico psicologico nei bambini: Dati preliminari di validazione del Test di Lessico Emotivo (TLE) [Theory of mind and children’s comprehension of the emotionalstate lexicon: Preliminary validation data of the Emotional Lexicon Test (ELT)]. Psicologia Clinica dello Sviluppo, 15, 257–266.

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