"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.

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".

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

T. Dalgleish and M. J.

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).