"My child will actually say 'I am upset' Before all they would do was scream": Teaching parents emotion validation in a social care setting.

BACKGROUND: Emotion validation by parents has positive outcomes for children's emotional development, particularly in vulnerable families, but there is a lack of research on supporting health workers to teach emotion validation to parents whose children are open to early help and children's social services. There is also a theoretical debate about how best to conceptualize emotion validation and why it is beneficial to children. The purpose of the study was to test the feasibility of teaching emotion validation skills to parents and family workers in a social care setting and to examine the effects of such teaching on children's emotion awareness and emotion regulation. METHODS: This small scale qualitative feasibility study involved 11 parents (with children aged 2-5 years) who were receiving early help social services and five family workers. All parents took part in a 4-week course teaching emotionally validating parenting: either in a group class (six parents) or one-one delivery at home via a family worker (five parents). Effects on parents, children, and family workers were assessed using semi-structured interviews. RESULTS: Six themes were identified in qualitative analysis: (1) parent became more validating, (2) parent's own vulnerability affected their ability to use the skills, (3) child became more aware of emotions, (4) child became calmer and more accepting of negative emotions, (5) child transferred emotion validation to others, and (6) family workers incorporated emotion validation techniques into their professional practice. CONCLUSION: Results demonstrated the feasibility of teaching emotional validation skills to parents via both delivery methods, with positive outcomes reported for parents and children and positive impact reported on family worker practice. Qualitative analysis suggested that parental acceptance of child's negative emotions may be linked with greater self-awareness of negative emotions in the child.

On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness.

It is argued that one answer to the question of the rationality of emotion hinges on the different roles in action selection played by emotions when one is aware of them versus when one is not aware of them (awareness being indexed by the ability to report one's emotion). When unaware of one's emotions, they are: (a) not able to enter into one's deliberations about what to do, and (b) more likely to be automatically acted out. This is a problem for rationality because (partly due to the logic of signal detection theory) emotional action urges are often "false positives". In contrast, awareness of emotions crucially allows emotional responses to be inhibited: such inhibition is necessary for truly rational action selection. Furthermore, awareness enables Reflective Revision--the modification of one's theories and action plans as a result of awareness of inconsistencies between theories and data, and action plans and goals.

How many selves in emotion experience? Reply to Dalgleish and Power (2004).

T. Dalgleish and M. J. Power (see record 2004-15929-012) suggest that J. A. Lambie and A. J. Marcel's (2002) article implicitly presents a unitary view of self in emotion experience and propose that certain clinical phenomena require multiple selves. This reply summarizes Lambie and Marcel's usages of the term self and examines both Dalgleish and Power's gloss of these and their own usages. This indicates that their own central usage of the term misrepresents Lambie and Marcel and is itself an improper usage. More important, examination of the phenomena claimed to require multiple selves suggests that they do not and that Dalgleish and Power may have misread the relevant clinical literature. Finally, Lambie and Marcel's own conception of dissociative phenomena and multiple selves are outlined, and alternative approaches are sketched. In discussing the usages of the term self and interpretation of cognitive and affective disorders, this reply attempts to clarify certain confusions.

Consciousness and the varieties of emotion experience: a theoretical framework.

Data reviewed suggest that previous theories of emotion experience are too narrow in scope and that lack of consensus is due to the fact that emotion experience takes various forms and is heterogenous. The authors treat separately the content of emotion experience, the underlying nonconscious correspondences, and processes producing emotion experience. They classify the nature and content of emotion experience and propose that it depends on 3 aspects of attention: mode (analytic-synthetic; detached-immersed), direction (self-world), and focus (evaluation-action). The account is informed by a 2-level view of consciousness in which phenomenology (1st order) is distinguished from awareness (2nd order). These distinctions enable the authors to differentiate and account for cases of "unconscious" emotion, in which there is an apparent lack of phenomenology or awareness.