How to Foster Toddlers' Mental-State Talk, Emotion Understanding, and Prosocial Behavior: A Conversation-Based Intervention at Nursery School

Recent years have seen the development and implementation of a range of training programs aimed at improving children's socio-emotional skills. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted with toddlers attending nursery school. In this study, we adopted observational and experimental paradigms to examine the efficacy of an intervention based on conversing about emotions with small groups of 2- to 3-year-old children. The intervention was designed to promote toddlers' mental-state talk, emotion understanding (EU), and prosocial behavior. The training group significantly outperformed the control group in the use of mental-state language, especially emotional-state lexicon, EU, and prosocial behavior toward peers. There was also a significant Group × Age interaction, with the older training group participants displaying greater gains in EU than the younger ones. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.