TALKING ABOUT FEELINGS - YOUNG CHILDRENS ABILITY TO EXPRESS EMOTIONS

Objective: The aim is to establish which emotion-descriptive language is used by children at different ages. Method: Fifty-six children (age d 5 to 11 years) were presented with a set of plastic playpeople. Scen arios were enacted using the toys to elicit emotion descriptive vocabu lary in response to the interviewer's question: How do you think s/he feels about that? Eight adult subjects participated as a control. Resu lts: Children under the age of 8 years have a limited repertoire of la bels to describe emotions. Even 11-year-olds are unable to produce voc abulary which expresses emotion concepts described by adults. The impl ications of our findings for child-police interviews are discussed. (C ) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.