Emotion understanding in English- and Spanish-speaking preschoolers enrolled in head start

Research assessing children's emotion understanding has increased over the past several years. Despite the proliferation of research, there have been few studies conducted examining the development of emotion understanding in children from diverse backgrounds. Further, there has been no research conducted examining the psychometric properties of emotion understanding measures when used with children from diverse backgrounds. A total of 597 preschool children from low-income families enrolled in Head Start (248 Spanish-speaking and 349 English-speaking) were given an emotion understanding assessment in their native language at two sessions separated by six months. All children showed significant growth in emotion understanding abilities from time 1 to time 2, with English-speaking children generally outperforming Spanish-speaking children. The psychometric performance of the measure was analyzed for both English and Spanish samples and for English-speaking children at different levels of language ability.