UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Verron, HeatherSubject: search.filters.subject.affective perspective taking

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    Assessment of Emotion Understanding in Preschoolers: Multiple-Choice vs. Open-Ended Methods
    (2014) Verron, Heather; Teglasi, Hedwig; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This study examines a new method of assessing emotion understanding in preschoolers. Prior research has established that preschool is a critical time for emotion understanding development and that emotion understanding abilities are related to such important outcomes as social competence. Traditionally, measures of emotion understanding present multiple-choice questions that require children to select one emotion that is most likely to be elicited in various situations. However, this study proposes an alternative method in which children are asked to explain their answers on a subset of items. Their open-ended responses are then coded for quality of reasoning. Results establish preliminary evidence of the reliability and validity of the new assessment method. Notably, multiple regression analyses indicate that the coded emotion reasoning scores are a better predictor of social competence than scores obtained using traditional multiple-choice procedures. Limitations of the study and implications for future research are also discussed.