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

questioning for each child (Denham & Couchoud, 1990). These two tasks collectively
represent children‘s affective labeling capabilities. Following these tasks, a researcher
uses emotionally expressive facial and vocal cues to demonstrate the emotions shown on
each felt face for children (Denham, 2006a).
Third, children are asked to label a puppet‘s emotions using the four felt emotion
faces after a puppeteer enacts 14 brief vignettes using emotionally expressive facial and
vocal cues (see Appendix G). This task represents children‘s affective perspective-taking
capabilities. Eight vignettes include typical scenarios that would elicit happy sad, angry,
and scared responses from children (e.g., feeling scared during a nightmare), and the
remaining six vignettes include puppets expressing feelings opposite what each child‘s
mother reported the child would feel (see Appendix D). Puppets are matched to
children‘s gender (Denham, 1986) and to children‘s ethnicity (i.e., Caucasian, Hispanic,
African American, and Asian) to help achieve cultural sensitivity. For all three subtests, a
score of 2 is assigned for correct responses, a score of 1 is assigned for incorrect
responses of correct emotional valence (e.g., sad instead of angry), and a score of 0 is
assigned for an incorrect response of incorrect emotional valence (e.g., sad instead of
happy; Denham, 1986). Based on this scoring method, possible scores for the expressive
and receptive subtests ranged from 0 to 8; and possible scores for the puppet vignette
subtest ranged from 0 to 40. For analysis purposes, possible scores for affective labeling
(including expressive and receptive subtest scores) ranging from 0 to 16 and possible
scores for affective perspective taking (including puppet vignette subtest scores) ranging
from 0 to 40 were calculated. Denham (1986) reported Cronbach‘s alpha values of .89 for
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