The effect of structured picturebook narrative intervention on emotional understanding in 5-6-year-old Chinese children.

This study investigated the effectiveness of an 8-week, structured picturebook narrative intervention on emotional understanding among 5-6-year-old children in eastern China. A total of 97 children were randomly assigned to either an intervention group (n = 49) or a control group (n = 48). The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) was administered at pre-test and post-test. Repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant group×time interaction effect, with the intervention group showing significantly greater improvements in emotion recognition, understanding of emotional causes, and emotional inference (all p < 0.001). Between-group effect sizes (Cohen's d) ranged from 1.12 to 1.62, indicating large intervention effects. These findings confirm that structured, emotion-focused picturebook narrative intervention effectively enhances young children's emotional understanding, providing culturally relevant evidence for early childhood social-emotional education in the Asia-Pacific region.