Emotion Talk in Early Childhood: A Systematic Literature Review

Emotion talk is a research-based strategy aimed at improving young children’s social and emotional development. To date, there are no systematic reviews that document the effectiveness of teacher’s emotion talk with young children in early childhood classrooms. In this systematic review we examined the literature on teacher-facilitated emotion talk as a primary intervention to improve young children’s social and emotional development. We identified six manuscripts that met our inclusion criteria. Results indicate emotion talk can improve social and emotional skills for young children in areas such as emotional knowledge and comprehension, prosocial behavior, and classroom engagement.