Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Izard Leads Team Updating Training Program to Help At-Risk Kids
Izard gratefully acknowledges the contributions
Professor Carroll Izard’s “Emotion Course” trains teachers to use puppets and story-telling to help Head Start youngsters learn from emotional experiences. Now, Izard and his team of researchers are adding new components to the groundbreaking program.
We can thank Charles Darwin. Professor Carroll Izard credits Darwin with inspiring the research that has consumed him for the past 30+ years. Izard, the Trustees Distinguished Professor of Psychology, has studied the central role emotions play in motivating and organizing perception, cognition, and action. Over the past several years, Izard and lab assistants have translated research into a program guiding the emotional development of children from economically disadvantaged families at Head Start centers in Delaware.
What’s the Darwin connection?
“He wrote a book called Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals,” Izard explains. “I read it in 1966, and it was a significant influence in my choice of research. It gave me the confidence in what I was trying to do.” Izard says it’s fitting to acknowledge Darwin’s influence this year, the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.
The goal of Izard’s research is helping children acquire “emotion knowledge,” the understanding of the expressions, experience, and functions of emotions. Increasing emotion knowledge typically leads to an increase in emotion regulation. Emotion knowledge and emotion regulation together enable children (and adults as well) to make constructive use of the energy and motivation provided by emotion feeling or emotion experience. The acquisition of emotion knowledge and emotion regulation can begin as early as infancy, but we haven’t yet found a way to measure them objectively until about two to three years of age. Izard’s Head Start subjects are typically three to five years of age, at risk for behavior problems at home and in daily life.
Izard has developed a program that translates his research into practice. The “Emotion Course” he developed, together with a Teacher’s Manual, is used by teachers to help young children learn from emotional experiences. Using puppets and other storytelling techniques, teachers can tease out children’s emotional responses and help them learn to manage their feelings in a positive and constructive way.
Izard’s newest research project will introduce a Parent’s Emotions Course, giving parents the tools to apply his concepts at home and reinforce progress made in Head Start programs. Getting parents involved, notes Izard, has been his biggest single challenge.
Over the past 10 years, Izard’s research has evolved, and his Emotions Course has been refined materially and conceptually. Currently, he is in the second year of a five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Plans are to follow the Head Start subjects for three years, through second grade, in order to document the lasting effects of the Emotions Course as a preventive intervention.
Izard gratefully acknowledges the contributions of everyone in his lab, including the lab manager, research technician, a post-doctoral researcher, and five graduate students. “Our basic, translational, and intervention research on emotions has attracted excellent staff, graduate students and post-docs. It’s an unusual opportunity for them to become involved in a clinical science program that converts research to applications in the world around us” he says. Graduate students may choose to participate in basic research that strengthens the scientific basis of the program, the development of auxiliary program materials, program implementation, or program evaluation research.
Learn more about:
- Professor Carroll Izard and his research
- the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology, including information about program requirements
