Research Story: 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 diverse 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].

^[5]

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.

Why is it be important for children to develop strategies for emotional regulation?

What are some future questions you might want to examine about theatre education, emotional regulation, or emotional understanding?

In what other ways could the knowledge gained through Dr. Goldstein’s theater games research improve the lives of children?

KEY Integrative THEME:

Applying psychological principles can change our lives, organizations, and communities in positive ways.

Psychologists study how people make sense of the world, themselves, and each other. The resulting knowledge from this vast field of study doesn’t just sit in a library of research articles, a digital database, or a scientist’s head. It is communicated to a wide audience through books, blogs, news articles, movies and shows, parents, educators, and more. The psychological knowledge or principles that make up our understanding of how people think, feel, and behave also help us understand what happens when things go wrong for people. We can then design ways to prevent things from going in an undesirable direction (such as laws or parenting practices), or interventions to change what happens when things go wrong (such as psychological treatment or new policies). Psychology is found in the world in expected places, such as a therapist’s or counselor’s office, and unexpected places, such as government or nature.

*** LETS BREAK THIS DOWN PLACEHOLDER

In this chapter, you will read some examples of how psychological science is applied in the world outside of the research lab. Dr. Thalia Goldstein’s work with young children and theater games demonstrates how psychological research can impact our lives. Dr. Reeshad Dalal and Dr. Seth Kaplan’s research on emotion regulation shows psychological principles at work in organizations, and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on the impact of words on our nervous system provides examples of how psychology can change our communities, and organizations.

You may have already found some applications for psychology in your work or personal life. What have you learned so far in this course that has been or might be useful?

Can you take another key theme and look at these topics through that lens?

Applying Psychological Principles In Our Organizations

Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions for Emotion Regulation

While theatre education can support children’s development of skills, adults too can practice and strengthen their emotion regulation abilities. In the labs of psychologists Dr. Reeshad Dalal^[6] and Dr. Seth Kaplan^[7] at George Mason University, researchers study emotion regulation from an industrial-organizational psychologist’s perspective: in the workplace. They created the infographic below (Fig. 6.3) to share their research. This infographic focuses on effective emotion regulation in the workplace, but, when you examine it, think about what these strategies might look like when applied to non-work situations as well. These tools can be used by anyone looking to manage their emotions.

Effective Strategies

Dalal and Kaplan found that the most effective strategy to help manage negative emotions and maintain positive ones was reappraising the situation. This means reframing the way you think about the situation even if it feels negative by looking for any positive outcomes from it. Another somewhat effective emotion regulation strategy was reappraising the emotion itself, meaning accepting whatever emotion you are feeling as normal instead of bad and reminding yourself the emotion won’t last forever. The last strategy, perspective-taking, was found to be the least effective of the three. Perspective-taking is when you try to separate yourself from the situation to be neutral. The researchers found these emotional regulation strategies to be helpful in the context of being more productive and having better performance at work.

Why do you think perspective-taking appears to be less effective than reappraisal?

These findings about effective emotion regulation were limited to the context of employee well-being and job performance, but the strategies can also be effective in other areas of life. Reappraising situations and emotions, and acting as a neutral observer are emotion regulation tools used in a variety of contexts. If the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies was studied in a family or school context, do you think the results would be different? If so, which one do you think would be more effective?

Can you think of situations where you could use these tools?

It is important to note that emotion regulation is not emotion suppression – which is a coping strategy that can be unhealthy. When emotion is suppressed, the person does not identify, acknowledge, or express it and this can lead to negative physical and relational consequences. Our emotions are important signals that help us to function well – and should not be ignored. Emotion regulation on the other hand, is a skill that can help you manage negative emotions before they become overwhelming and overpower life experiences.

How is “reappraising the situation” different from “reappraising the emotion?” Why is this an important distinction?

applying psychological principles In the Community

How Emotions Are Made

Do you want to learn more about emotions and how they are made? The more you understand emotions, the more you may be able to further develop your regulation skills. The video below is a TED talk by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist and emotions researcher at Northeastern University who studies how the human brain, in conversation with the body and the world, regulates the body and creates mental events, such as episodes of emotion.

“Emotions are not made FOR you, they are made BY you.”

– Lisa Feldman Barrett

Dr. Barrett describes how understanding how emotions are created and experienced can help people regulate emotions like test anxiety – something that prevents some people from succeeding in college. Anxiety is an emotion that can often be refrained or appraised into another emotion, such as determination or excitement, and it is a learned skill. This understanding of how to reframe the interpretations of difficult emotions such as anxiety or nervousness, is another example of how we can change our lives using psychological science.

Words Matter

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett also studies how words impact our brains and our bodies. Many species regulate each others’ nervous systems through sensory channels. For example, chemicals (such as pheromones), vocalizations, touch, smell, and vision are used by insects, mammals, and primates for communication that regulates nervous systems. Humans are unique in that they can use words as well as hugs, scents, and visuals. Our words can have a powerful impact on others – they can be a calming influence, then can trigger stress or fear, or they can affect trust and distrust. This is reflected in our nervous system, and can even be seen through brain scans. Words alone can influence activity in brain regions associated with movement, vision, and other bodily functions such as heart-rate, breathing, and the immune system.

Now that we understand the effect our words can have on other people’s nervous systems, we can reflect on the power we have to impact others’ experiences^[10]. We don’t need a lot of money or expertise to use our words in an influential way in our communities daily.

For example, have you been told to always use “person-first language?” This is different from “first person.” For example, instead of referring to someone as “a homeless person,” (and thus centering homelessness), you would center the person by saying “a person experiencing homelessness.” The general recommendation is to center the humanity of a person rather than a characteristic, condition, or disability. However, it turns out that many people in the disability community, especially disability rights advocates, prefer identity first language. This is also true of many in the autistic community. Many people refer to themselves as “deaf” or “autistic,” rather than “a deaf person” or “a person with autism.”

There is no true consensus among these communities regarding person-first language, but the use of euphemisms such as “differently abled” or “special needs” that were created primarily by non-disabled people are often viewed as infantilizing or patronizing by disabled people. This is important information, because if someone insists on calling someone “special needs” and those words feel infantilizing to the person they are talking about, then that person’s nervous system will be stressed more than necessary. We can unknowingly cause distress in others with the words we choose to use. In fact, researchers have found that a positive identification with disability, across studies and populations, has been associated with better adaptation to disability (such as hope, optimism, quality of life), better engagement in care, lessened impact of ableism, and even lower depression and anxiety symptoms^[11].

How can people outside of the disability community, such as teachers, classmates, neighbors, encourage positive identification with disability?

Language and Disability: Relevance for the Psychology Student

So what do we do to avoid unknowingly stressing other people’s nervous systems? The best thing to do is to just ask a person how they want to be addressed and to be mindful of common phrases that are rooted in ableism and negative attitudes about disability. Language is important when it comes to attitude, and the avoidance of the word “disabled” has been seen as having negative consequences. In fact, there is a movement called #Saytheword that encourages people to add the word “disability” back into their language^[14].

Adding the word “disability” back into our language as a valued social identity can improve our communities for disabled people. We know that the extent of disability experienced by an individual is significantly influenced by their environment. Inaccessible spaces can create obstacles that make engaging in basic activities such as healthcare, education, and employment difficult. In communities where spaces and experiences are built with accessibility in mind, disabled people will both have more opportunities and feel more like they belong in that community^[15]. Accessibility ranges from physical access to spaces, (steps, ramps, elevators, wide enough doorways and walkways, seating) to digital access (text to speech, visibility of text and images, reading level, usability of websites and digital forms) and more. These considerations can change the environment so that the disability is not as much of a barrier.

What conditions would be necessary for a community to recognize disability as a valued social identity? What about other identities that are historically marginalized?

Traditional education spaces are environments that are often experienced as inaccessible. Recent estimates show that at least 12-13% of college students have a disability that impacts their learning. And yet, only about 6% of students access accommodations in the college classroom. Some students say they don’t access accommodations just as extended time on tests because they feel it is cheating – as do many non-disabled students. The reasoning behind classroom accommodations, however, is to level the playing field. If it takes me an hour to do something it only takes you a half hour to do, and I am only given half an hour, then I cannot demonstrate my knowledge or learn to my full capacity. You don’t need more than 30 minutes – in fact, providing more time for students who don’t need it does not improve test scores. Next time you hear someone saying that it’s not okay to access extended time accommodations, could you speak up and try to change their mind?

If you, your family or friends, or your classmates are disabled, this conversation might seem relevant. But even if none of the above are true, the psychology student needs to pay attention to language and accessibility. The American Psychological Association has guidelines on inclusive language to be used in writing and other forms of communication in psychology, and there are basic accessibility considerations for anything you create that will be “consumed” by the general public. These should be consulted when completing assignments and projects in your classes. For example, the following list from the APA guidelines suggests terms to avoid and alternatives. Note that many of these options use person-first language; the distinction between person-first and identity-first is less important here. The focus is on traditionally used terms that should be avoided and what to use instead.

Connections and Summary

In this chapter you have read examples of the key theme at work. Dr. Goldstein’s lab used scientific methods to determine what kinds of play can help children to develop crucial emotion regulation skills. This research was published and so that others can continue to study this phenomenon, and so that it teachers and parents can develop activities for children to support their development (applying psychological principles can change our lives). The Industrial-organizational psychologists Dr. Dalal and Dr. Kaplan studied strategies for emotion regulation in the workplace, and created an infographic to share their results with the general public. When people practice these strategies, it enhances the overall working environment  (applying psychological principles can change our organizations). The American Psychological Association has published guidelines to encourage the use of language that will reduce the emotional distress that can be caused by harmful words. Additionally, our communities can be enhanced through the recognition of disability as a valued social identity (applying psychological principles can change our communities in positive ways).

REFERENCES