Bridging Emotion in the Classroom with Child Understanding: Initial Findings from Linguistic Analysis for SEL Programs

Research on how children develop emotion concepts is vital to successful, culturally sensitive social–emotional learning (SEL) programs that account for individual differences in the development of SEL skills. This study presents a thematic analysis of child emotion definitions and potential implications for SEL programs as an exploration of how children are taught about emotions and to center child voice in SEL research. It is the first, to the researchers’ knowledge, to link child emotion representation with SEL programs by analyzing emotion-focused program content through the lens of a child’s emotional representational system. A total of 1239 definitions produced by 49 children ages 8 to 11 (Mage = 9.24; SD = 0.75; 46.9% Female; 69% multilingual) were analyzed. Eight themes were identified in the definition corpus via thematic analysis and used as a framework to which 38 SEL programs were mapped. A majority of SEL programs addressed the following themes in the child-informed emotion framework: ‘interpersonal dynamics’ (addressed by 97% of programs), ‘cognitive states’ (95%), ‘performing an activity’ (87%), and ‘observable signs’ (71%) that referred to physical/sensory experience. When defining emotions, over 80% of children mentioned ‘interpersonal dynamics’ (e.g., rejection), ‘experiencing a non-social situation’ (e.g., a disappointing event), and ‘observable signs’ (e.g., sleeping). Findings offer preliminary insight into how a sample of children in middle childhood describe and make meaning of emotions, and prompt an exploratory discussion on emotion-focused content in SEL programs for middle childhood. Definitions collected constitute an emotion definition database available for future research on child emotion language.