Sample A: Cover Page of Thesis, Project, or Dissertation Proposal

Appendix L
Emotion Coaching Families
The Meta-Emotion Interview
Gottman, Katz, and Hooven (1997) developed the Meta-Emotion Interview and
administered it to mothers and fathers. The interview includes questions about four major
components:
1. Parent‘s and child‘s sadness
2. Parent‘s and child‘s anger
3. Hard and easy emotions for parent
4. Parent‘s perceptions of child‘s emotion regulation abilities and problems
Based on their interviews with parents, they characterized three groups:
Awareness of one’s own emotion is being able to talk about the emotion in a differentiated
manner (differentiating various types and intensities of the emotion), particularly that the subject
experiences this emotion, has no problem distinguishing this emotion from others, answers
questions easily, without hesitation or confusion, talks at length about the emotion, and shows
interest and excitement about this emotion.
Awareness of the child’s emotion is noticing when the child has the emotion, having no problem
distinguishing this emotion from others, being descriptive of the child‘s emotion, having insight
into the child‘s experience of the emotion, being descriptive of some part of the remediation
process (e.g., what makes child feel better), knowing the cause of the child‘s emotion, being able
to talk at length and easily about the child‘s experience, and being interested in the child‘s
experience.
Coaching the child’s emotion involves helping the child to verbally label the emotions begin felt,
showing respect for the child‘s experience of this emotion (i.e., accepting the emotion), when the
child is upset, the parent talking to the child, intervening in situations that caused the emotion, at
times comforting the child during the emotion, teaching the child appropriate rules for expressing
the emotion, educating the child about the nature of the emotion, teaching the child strategies for
dealing with the emotion, and for soothing the intense levels of the emotion.
Emotion-Coaching Families
Emotion-coaching parents are doing the following five things:
1. The parent is aware of the child’s emotion.
First, the parent is aware of the child‘s emotion. This generally means being aware of relatively
lower intensity emotions. A child does not have to be weeping for a parent to detect the signs of
sadness, nor be enraged for the parent to detect the signs of anger. It appears to be important to
emotion-coaching parents to connect with their children when their children are being emotional
before the negative emotion escalates to a high intensity.
2. The parent sees the child’s emotion as an opportunity for intimacy or
teaching.
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