Comparison Study On Emotion Understanding Between Deaf Preschoolers And Normal Preschoolers

Emotion understanding is the ability to understand the emotion of oneself or others through the appearances and clues of emotion situations and then response probably.Emotion understanding is the basic skill of social communications.Deaf children and the other hearing-impact group cannot make good social communication with others,owing to the lag of emotion understanding.Comparing the differences of emotion understanding between deaf preschoolers and normal preschoolers could offer the theory foundation to make intervention plan to improve hearing-impaired deaf preschoolers' emotion understanding.This study chose 107 preschoolers from a special school,including 52 deaf preschoolers with cochlea implant and 55 normal preschoolers.They were divided into four groups: older deaf preschoolers,younger deaf preschoolers,older normal preschoolers and younger normal preschoolers.Three methods were used separately to find the differences between deaf preschoolers and normal preschoolers,they are Test of Emotion Comprehension(TEC),thematic understanding and narrative evaluations task including narrative coherence,frame of mind and the supplementary evaluations.TEC tests for the general emotion recognition among different emotions;Thematic understanding tests for the specific elements understanding within one emotion,it is the emotion of jealousy in this study;Narrative evaluation tests for children's emotion perspective-taking ability.This study found that:(1)The emotion understanding of deaf preschoolers lags behind that of normal preschoolers in TEC;(2)The emotion understanding of deaf preschoolers lags behind that of normal preschoolers in the test of theme understanding;(3)The emotion understanding of deaf preschoolers lags behind that of normal preschoolers through the evaluations test of narrative;(4)Narrative coherence has the best correlation with younger deaf preschoolers' emotion understanding;(5)Frame of mind has the best correlation with older deaf preschoolers' emotion understanding;(6)Narrative coherence should be the core of emotion understanding narrative intervention for younger deaf preschoolers and frame of mind should be the core ofemotion understanding narrative intervention for older deaf preschoolers.Depending on these findings,we give some promoting methods based on narrative to improve deaf preschoolers' emotion understanding.It's of great importance for parents and teachers not only to offer deaf preschoolers emotion exposure surrounding in daily life,but also show more emotion experience to children through parent-child emotion theme picture books reading,and what's more we need to help deaf preschoolers understand emotion concepts through embodied cognition teaching.