Supporting Emotional Understanding

It can be difficult for children to recognise and understand emotions in themselves and others without adult support. Many children in Early Years settings do not yet have the vocabulary to identify feelings like “angry” or “frustrated”, or have the skills to interpret facial cues or body language. Adults can support children’s social-emotional development when they label and talk about emotions.

The Autism Good Practice Guide for Schools outlines the areas of focus in promoting emotional development and understanding:

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Communicating emotions

The teaching of emotional awareness forms the basis for the development of emotional regulation skills. Promoting emotional awareness begins with a focus on recognising body cues for emotion and then labelling these. For children with more complex learning needs, it is important that adults recognise emotional states and provide a concrete or visual strategy for the student to communicate their needs, e.g. emotion thermometers and rating scales.

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Labelling emotions

Labelling emotions helps to develop emotional literacy by supporting children to recognise emotional states – and their associated physiological states – in themselves and others, in order to understand and use the language of emotion.

Emotional awareness can be developed by supporting children to observe body language, facial expression and tone of voice. The development of skills to accurately identify and label emotions in others and in real-life situations can be supported through the use of photographs, puppets, visual aids, emojis, role play, social scripts or stories that explore and model feelings. The use of visual tools, such as communication boards, emotion thermometers, scales and colour coding can help students to identify emotions, the intensity of the emotion and whether that emotion is helpful or unhelpful.

The benefits of labelling emotions for children

Research tells us that the act of labelling emotions can help us feel calmer. Brain imaging studies show that when we are experiencing heightened emotions, labelling those emotions activates the prefrontal cortex (the thinking brain) and reduces the activity in the amygdala (the feeling brain). This means that naming emotions decreases our emotional reactivity – it puts the “brakes” on our big emotional reactions and helps us feel calmer.

Dr Dan Siegel coined the phrase “Name it to Tame it” to describe this process. He describes it as one of the first steps in managing big emotions and reducing emotional reactivity.

These are some of the benefits of labelling emotions for children:

• Labelling the child’s emotions is validating

Labelling the child’s emotions shows them that you understand what they are going through. It helps them to feel seen, heard and understood. When children feel that you understand their experience, they are better able to process their emotions and let them go.

• Labelling emotions gives children the vocabulary to talk about how they feel

When children do not have the words they need to describe how they feel, they will instead show us how they feel. Children who lack the vocabulary to tell us how they feel will show us with their behaviour.

• Labelling emotions helps us find solutions

Once we identify the specific emotion, we can begin to understand where it’s coming from. And then, we can work on collaborative problem solving with the child, or we can guide them towards an appropriate coping strategy.

• Labelling emotions builds empathy

When children learn to identify and label emotions in themselves, and have had the experience of someone respectfully guiding them through the process of understanding and managing those emotions, they become skilled at doing this with others, too. When we consistently talk to children about emotions, they learn to identify what those emotions look and feel like in their bodies and in others.

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