Applying psychological principles In Our Lives

Pretend Play and Emotional Control in Young Children

Dr. Thalia R. Goldstein^[2], a developmental psychologist at George Mason University, studied how participation in drama classes impacted the development of emotional regulation in five-year-old children. Young children have diffuse interests, meaning they are interested in many different things. Because everything is a learning opportunity when they are young, five-year-olds were the perfect age group to introduce this theater intervention.

The Research Design

Goldstein wanted to examine how dramatic play might have a unique impact compared to other types of play with similar elements – in other words, are drama games beneficial in different ways than other play activities?

Goldstein hypothesized that it was the embodiment aspect of theatre and dramatic play that would cause changes for children. What does “embodying emotion” looks like? Goldstein gives the ‘right foot’ example: “Shift your right foot as if you were the most important and most powerful person in this room. How does your right foot feel different? Now I want you to imagine your right foot as if your favorite person in the whole world is about to walk through the door. What would your right food be doing right now?” That is an example of making an abstract emotion physical, or embodying it using your foot.

Because Goldstein and her fellow researchers wanted to be able to make a causal claim, she used a randomized controlled field intervention. The children were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, for eight weeks:

1. Drama Games – games included acting out narratives with embodied emotions and characters with guidance around emotional embodiment.
2. Block Play – guided block building, embodied action, no narrative, characters, or emotions.
3. Story Time  – stories that included characters and emotions, no emotional guidance or embodiment.

Each of these conditions was designed to analyze different aspects of theatre education. All three conditions included groups of four children interacting with each other along with some form of guidance for the activity, but the drama games condition was the only one with emotional guidance. The Story Time condition included discussion of emotion, but no emotional embodiment and no physical action. The Block Play group included embodiment of action but no emotion or narrative. Comparison of the three groups can allow the researcher to come to stronger conclusions about the impact of drama games compared to simply observing a theater class.

The data collection phase of the study was double-blind, which means the researchers who observe and collect data are unaware of which kids were in what condition, or the point of the study overall. This helps minimize any experimenter bias. The data collection occurred before and after the eight week intervention and consisted of three parts:

1. A Theory of Mind test
2. A task where children had to give stickers away
3. A task where the experimenter would ‘accidentally’ hurt themselves or drop something to see how the child would react. Would they cry? Or freeze?

Each of these tasks were designed to measure the extent to which children are prosocial and understanding of others. Goldstein also looked at how children understood their own emotions through several tasks. This included showing puppets that have different emotional responses and then asking the children which puppet was “most like” them.

The Research Results

Goldstein and her colleagues found no effect of the drama games condition on children’s engagement or understanding, but it did affect their emotional control. The children who were in the dramatic play group showed significantly less personal distress in a task than they did before the intervention started and compared to the children who were in the block play or story time groups. This was true for both their observed behavioral distress levels (such as crying or looking distressed) and the children’s self-report of their distress levels^[4].

What do do these results tell us? What are the larger takeaways or theories we can draw from this experiment? Goldstein uses the analogy of a toolbox. She concludes that participating in theatre and playing drama games can add to an emotional toolbox for children learning to manage emotions. Each dramatic game or exercise may require a different tool or use a different toolbox; however they all are tools for emotion. Each tools theatre provides can be considered a strategy or skill for emotional regulation or emotional understanding that kids can then use outside of the theatre game. The more children can learn about emotions, the more they can regulate them and understand them in others. Theatre games just help children gain those tools that they can then take with them in their toolbox into the real world.