Teachers as co-regulators of children's emotions: A descriptive study of teacher-child emotion dialogues in special education.
Verbal IQ and warm teacher bonds set the stage for richer emotion talk—AEED shows you exactly where to step in.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers watched 64 special-ed teachers talk with their students about feelings. They used a new tool called AEED to score how rich these talks were. Kids had mixed diagnoses and were 6–13 years old.
The team also gave each child a quick IQ test and a social-skills checklist. They asked teachers how close they felt to each student. Then they looked at what predicted better emotion chats.
What they found
AEED ratings were steady across coders, so the tool is reliable. Children with higher verbal IQ had longer, deeper emotion talks. The same happened for kids rated more prosocial and for those with warmer teacher bonds.
In plain numbers, verbal IQ and closeness each added about one full AEED level. That jump can mean the difference between naming a feeling and explaining why it happened.
How this fits with other research
Plant et al. (2007) extends these findings by showing teacher video coaching later boosts child social skills. The current study maps the baseline; the 2007 study proves you can move it.
Nijs et al. (2016) and La Malfa et al. (2009) also validated emotion-coding tools (SAED) for older groups. They show the same pattern: reliable codes and strong links to adaptive behavior.
Anthony et al. (2020) found verbal skill predicts emotion-regulation gains after CBT in autistic children. Together the papers say: verbal ability matters across settings, ages, and interventions.
Ten Hoopen et al. (2025) looks like a contradiction—emotion codes barely shifted ADOS-2 scores. But they coded brief clinic moments, while L et al. coded long classroom talks. Context length explains the gap.
Why it matters
Use AEED to spot which students need extra scaffolds. If a child scores low, add visual feeling cards or sentence starters. Build teacher closeness with daily five-minute check-ins. Target these steps for kids with weaker verbal scores first; the data say they’ll gain the most.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: The study examined how teachers and children with emotional and behavioral disturbances engage in dialogues about children's emotional experiences. Dialogues about emotions are an important strategy for teachers to co-regulate children's emotions but have remained understudied. AIMS: This study aimed to explore whether the Autobiographical Emotional Events Dialogue (AEED) can help to assess the quality of teacher-child emotion dialogues about past emotional events and examined associations with child behavior and teacher-child relationship quality. METHOD: The sample included 85 children and 70 teachers from special education schools serving children with emotional and behavioral disturbances. Teacher-child dialogues were videotaped and coded using the 16 rating scales of the AEED coding system (Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Carasso, & Haimovich, 2003). RESULTS: The scales (except child boundary dissolution) could be reliably assessed. A Principal Component Analysis yielded 4 factors: Adequate task completion (coherent dialogues and positive child task behavior), Negativity (hostility and teacher boundary dissolution), Teacher Guidance (involvement, structuring, and acceptance), and Resolution (positive closure of negative stories). Child age, verbal intelligence, prosocial behavior, and higher teacher-child relationship scores (higher closeness, lower conflict) were positively associated with the quality of the dialogues but behavior problems were not. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The study provides first insight in teachers' scaffolding of dialogues with children about negative emotional events in special education serving children with emotional and behavioral disturbances.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2021 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2021.103894