Enhancing social cognition by training children in emotion understanding: A primary school study Veronica Ornaghi a,⇑ , Jens Brockmeier b , Ilaria Grazzani a a Department of Human Sciences, University of Milano–Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy b Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada article info Article history: Received 21 February 2013 Revised 9 October 2013 Keywords: Emotion understanding Theory of mind Conversation on emotions Empathy Intervention study Primary school Social cognition abstract We investigated whether training school-age children in emotion understanding had a significant effect on their social cognition. Participants were 110 children (mean age = 7 years 3 months) assigned to training and control conditions. Over a 2-month inter- vention program, after the reading of illustrated scenarios based on emotional scripts, the training group was engaged in conversations on emotion understanding, whereas the control group was simply asked to produce a drawing about the story. The training group outperformed the control group on emotion comprehension, the- ory of mind, and empathy, and the positive training outcomes for emotion understanding remained stable over 6 months. Implica- tions of the findings are discussed. Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Our study follows in the well-established line of inquiry into the development of social cognition (Hughes, 2011), an area that includes children’s theory of mind (ToM), empathy, and emotion under- standing (EU). Specifically, we set out to investigate how training primary school children in EU using a conversational approach might affect their later social cognition. Recent studies on social under- standing have increasingly focused on the primary school years (Miller, 2012), highlighting the con- tinued development of social cognitive and meta-reflexive abilities throughout this period. In particular, during middle childhood, key changes may be observed in a range of social cognition skills, including advanced ToM, empathy, and mastery of the more complex components of emotion comprehension. 0022-0965/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2013.10.005 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: veronica.ornaghi1@unimib.it (V. Ornaghi). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 119 (2014) 26–39 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Child Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jecp