Exploring the impact of shared-book reading on school-age children’s understanding of emotions

Abstract

Emotion comprehension has been shown to have numerous benefits, many of these being in the areas of social and academic functioning. Emotion comprehension starts to develop in early childhood and because of its many advantages, studies have used various interventions to try and teach emotion comprehension skills to children of different ages. The few interventions in the literature were complex, not readily accessible, lengthy or required much training for administrators. Some of these studies also combined a variety of different strategies and tools, making it unclear which specific components are effective. The current study looked solely at the effectiveness of shared book reading with picture books created based on current models of emotion comprehension. Fortyfive children were divided into control and experimental groups. Over the course of seven exposures, results revealed significant gains in emotion comprehension for both groups, with gains from children in the experimental group being slightly greater than those in the control group. These results give promising insight, suggesting that a short intervention such as this one could be effective in future studies with the combination of strategies oby isolating different strategies and looking at their effectiveness.