Promoting toddlers’ emotion knowledge and prosocial behaviors: a training study at nursery.

Introduction: The awareness that emotional and prosocial skills begin to develop during the early years underpins increasing efforts to find ways of promoting social and emotional development in young children. Nevertheless, few intervention studies have been conducted with toddlers in educational settings. Following the line of inquiry that examines the role of conversation about inner states in the early development of socioemotional competence, the current study makes an original contribution by evaluating the efficacy of a conversational intervention (TEPP, Toddlers Empathy Prosociality Program) in fostering toddlers’ emotion understanding and prosocial conduct. Method: 127 toddlers (Mage=29.22 months; range: 24-36) took part to a pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design. They were administered the Prosocial Tasks Battery for Infants (Brazzelli & Grazzani, in press) for assessing prosocial behaviors, the Affect Knowledge Task (Denham, 1986) for emotion knowledge, and the Picture Naming Game (Bello et al., 2010) with the aim to control for any effects of verbal ability. All toddlers participated in a 2-month program during which specially trained teachers read prosocial stories to small groups of children and then involved the children in conversations about inner states and prosocial behavior (Condition 1), in conversations about concrete actions and physical states (Condition 2), or in free play activities (Condition 3). Results: To verify the impact of the training on toddlers’ abilities, a repeated-measures ANCOVA was performed. Children in Condition 1 were found to outperform their peers in Conditions 2 and 3 on the emotion knowledge score, F(2, 134) = 10.71, p < .001, η2 = .277, and on measures of prosocial behaviors, F(2, 134) = 11.97, p < .001, η2 = .152. Conclusion: The results confirmed that conversation about inner states and prosocial actions can enhance the development of toddlers’ emotional and prosocial skills, encouraging the implementation of early education programs targeting prosociality among peers.