| Although children have the ability to communicate at birth, they may not be socially effective communicators. In addition to speech and language skills, social competency and cognitive understanding of the situation is required. Children also need an affective language vocabulary, (emotion words) that facilitates intimacy, helps explain or change behaviors, and situations. It would seem that social competency and emotion language are intuitively related. In addition, parents serve as primary socializing influences in the early years of children's development to provide feedback, modeling and training.;This study tested the hypotheses that a training intervention in social skills would influence the rate of emotion language the children use. It also examined what impact parent involvement in the training intervention would have. Forty 2nd- to 5th grade boys and girls were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. All of the participants received a nine week social skills training intervention. Half of the participants' parents were involved in the training sessions and the other half participated without parent involvement.;The social skills training sessions were videotaped. Transcripts of conversations between the children were examined for frequency count of emotion words. An emotion word count was calculated for each child at each session, totaled in subsets (i.e. 1-3, 4-6, 7-9), and overall totals were computed for each child.;The ANOVAs for the parent versus no parent, and the sessions 1-3 and 1-9 comparisons failed to show significant effects. There was no correlation between social skills rated by parents and emotion word vocabulary at the beginning of social skill training intervention. |
