Research Topic

I have chosen to research the benefits of children who develop a large emotional vocabulary in relation to self-regulation and the development of prosocial skills. I chose this topic because I believe that more educators needs to be proactive in supporting emotional understanding in children intentionally and incidentally.  I believe that we don't provide enough emphasis on teaching children to label, understand, and properly express both simple and complex emotions.

While researching different articles and previous studies that I could use in this project, I realized a few things that I had not considered.  I had not considered how gender or culture may affect children's emotion understanding.  I was hopeful to find lots of research that had already been done that showed relations between children who had a large emotional vocabulary and those who did not in their regular behaviors.  I wanted to be able to read about correlations in how they expressed emotion and how they were better able to display prosocial skills such as showing empathy for others.  However, I did not find very many articles or specific research that has been done with preschoolers in this area.  I am hopeful that with more research, I will be able to find additional supporting material.

I did find several websites however that were helpful in providing lots of information regarding building social emotional development in children.  There were many curriculums, training materials, and other resources that could be used, but not that specifically focused on building emotional vocabularies.  I hope to be able to find useable assessment tools that will be able to help track emotional development, vocabulary skills, expressive traits, and their link to behaviors.  I am open to ideas and suggestions from others!

A couple resources of previous studies I found helpful in this search are Preschool Children's Views on Emotion Regulation: Functional Associations and Implications for Social-Emotional Adjustment by Dennis & Kelemen, 2009 from the International ournal of Behavioral Development.  Another study is called Preschoolers' Understanding of Simple and Complex Emotions: Links with Gender and Language by Bosacki and Moore, 2004 in the journal called Sex Roles.  Both of these studies use puppets with children to role play different scenarios.