Emotion socialization plays a critical role in children’s emotional development (Denham, 2006; Denham et al., 2012), social skills (Burchinal et al., 2010), academic achievement (Djambazova-Popordanoska, 2016), behavioral outcomes (Gottman et al., 1997), and more. Emotion socialization, and specifically emotion talk, has been studied by many researchers in the context of parent-child interactions. Very few studies, however, have examined teacher use of emotion talk, defined as any utterance that mentions emotional states, describes possible causes or consequence of emotions, and/or asks questions about emotional states (Denham et al., 2015; Yelinek & Grady, 2019). This is an essential next step in the field as children spend a large portion of their time outside of the home and in the school setting, thus making teachers key emotion socialization agents.This study sought to provide a descriptive account of the proportion and type of teacher emotion talk used in the classroom and examined potential factors that contribute to variation in teacher emotion talk. Seventeen preschool teachers were audio recorded during a book-reading task and recordings were coded for proportion and function of emotion utterances. Teachers also completed several questionnaires to measure variables of interest (i.e., teacher stress, emotion regulation, emotion beliefs; student characteristics; teacher professional development and perceptions of support) potentially related to teacher use of emotion talk. Results indicated that preschool teachers used emotion talk about 27% of the time they were talking in this book-reading task, but teachers varied widely overall (M = .27, SD = .09, Min = .11, Max = .45). Functions of emotion utterances were calculated and results showed that teachers used mostly questions (40%) and comments (31%) when discussing emotions, followed by explanation (13%), guide (6%), socialization (5%), label (3%), and clarify (1%). Bivariate analyses were conducted and results indicated non-significant findings among several study variables and the outcome measure of emotion talk. However, findings showed a significant relationship between teacher use of emotion talk and students at-risk for disabilities in the classroom. That is, as portion of students at risk for disabilities in the classroom increased, teacher emotion talk decreased and as portion of children in the classroom that were rated as at-risk on the Social Skills Improvement System Social Emotional Learning Edition Screening and Monitoring Scales (SSIS-SEL) increased, the use of higher-level emotion talk decreased. Although largely descriptive and exploratory in nature, these preliminary findings have important implications for the field of emotion socialization and emotion talk in specific. Limitations, directions for future research, and implications for practice are discussed.
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