Tufikirie Hisia: An exploratory study of emotion understanding in Zanzibari preschoolers

Emotion understanding is an important competency for children entering school. It facilitates positive relationships with peers and teachers, and is associated with a number of academic outcomes. In this exploratory study, we created a novel, culturally sensitive assessment of emotion understanding, the Fikiria Hisia test (FHT), to investigate emotion understanding among preschoolers in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Participants were 43 typically developing children in their second year at a state-run preschool (25 girls, 28 boys). A within-subject design was adopted to examine the relationship between participants’ performance on the FHT and performance on the social-emotional domain of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA), developed by Save the Children (2011). We also investigated how participants’ understanding of four basic emotions (happy, sad, angry and scared) varied across different components of emotion understanding: emotion facial expression matching, knowledge of emotion labels, and understanding of which type of situations elicit which emotions. Regression models were used to examine the relationship between performance on the two assessments. Results indicated non-verbal performance in the FHT accounted for 11% of variance in performance on IDELA social-emotional items, despite all IDELA social-emotional items requiring verbal responses. Combined performance on FHT verbal and non-verbal tasks accounted for 7.9% of variance (p < .05) on IDELA social-emotional items, even after controlling for expressive language. Median scores for performance relating to each basic emotion across the different emotion understanding components were examined. These scores showed for each emotion, performance was highest on a different emotion understanding component. Floor effects were also found for the expressive knowledge of emotion labels task. A chi-square test investigated error types on this task and revealed the proportion of answers citing an appropriate behavioural manifestation of sadness was significantly higher than the proportion of answers citing an appropriate emotion label for sadness (p < .05). Finally, we examined the frequency of each facial expression being chosen in relation to 12 emotion-eliciting situations. Findings suggested images of laughing and crying faces were consistently associated with happy and sad situations respectively. Situations eliciting anger and fear triggered a variety of responses from participants. The results of this study imply non-verbal items make a valuable contribution to assessments of emotion understanding. At the same time, they suggest researchers approach these assessments with caution, as young children’s responses may reveal a real but nuanced understanding of emotions which existing tools are simply not sensitive enough to measure.

Keywords: socio-emotional development
child development
preschool
kindergarden
emotion comprehension
low-income country
social development
emotion understanding
assessment
mixed-methods
Tanzania
Zanzibar
feelings
Africa
learning assessment
Advisor: Nag, S