Tufikirie Hisia: An exploratory study of emotion understanding in Zanzibari preschoolers
<p>Emotion understanding is an important competency for children entering school. It facilitates positive relationships with peers and teachers, and is associated with a number of academic outcomes. In this exploratory study, we created a novel, culturally sensitive assessment of emotion under...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English Swahili |
| Published: |
2020
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| Summary: | <p>Emotion understanding is an important competency for children entering school. It facilitates
positive relationships with peers and teachers, and is associated with a number of academic
outcomes. In this exploratory study, we created a novel, culturally sensitive assessment of
emotion understanding, the Fikiria Hisia test (FHT), to investigate emotion understanding
among preschoolers in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Participants were 43 typically developing
children in their second year at a state-run preschool (25 girls, 28 boys). A within-subject
design was adopted to examine the relationship between participants’ performance on the
FHT and performance on the social-emotional domain of the International Development and
Early Learning Assessment (IDELA), developed by Save the Children (2011). We also
investigated how participants’ understanding of four basic emotions (happy, sad, angry and
scared) varied across different components of emotion understanding: emotion facial
expression matching, knowledge of emotion labels, and understanding of which type of
situations elicit which emotions. Regression models were used to examine the relationship
between performance on the two assessments. Results indicated non-verbal performance in
the FHT accounted for 11% of variance in performance on IDELA social-emotional items,
despite all IDELA social-emotional items requiring verbal responses. Combined performance
on FHT verbal and non-verbal tasks accounted for 7.9% of variance (p < .05) on IDELA
social-emotional items, even after controlling for expressive language. Median scores for
performance relating to each basic emotion across the different emotion understanding
components were examined. These scores showed for each emotion, performance was
highest on a different emotion understanding component. Floor effects were also found for
the expressive knowledge of emotion labels task. A chi-square test investigated error types on
this task and revealed the proportion of answers citing an appropriate behavioural
manifestation of sadness was significantly higher than the proportion of answers citing an
appropriate emotion label for sadness (p < .05). Finally, we examined the frequency of each
facial expression being chosen in relation to 12 emotion-eliciting situations. Findings
suggested images of laughing and crying faces were consistently associated with happy and
sad situations respectively. Situations eliciting anger and fear triggered a variety of responses
from participants. The results of this study imply non-verbal items make a valuable
contribution to assessments of emotion understanding. At the same time, they suggest
researchers approach these assessments with caution, as young children’s responses may
reveal a real but nuanced understanding of emotions which existing tools are simply not
sensitive enough to measure.</p> |
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