Understanding emotion awareness and emotion vocabulary in early primary school Vietnamese children: Quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Although being fundamental for both clinical and educational work with children, there is currently no in-depth research on examining children's emotion awareness and vocabulary in Vietnam. The goal of this exploratory study is to determine the effect of children's gender, grade level, and socioeconomic background on their emotion awareness and vocabulary, and the semantic and grammatical diversity of Vietnamese children's emotional vocabulary. The sample included 264 Vietnamese children (M = 7.80, SD = .97, 43.18% boys) as well as their mothers. Quantitative findings suggested that children in Grade 3 more frequently quoted surprise- and anger-related vocabulary than did those in lower grades. Children's socioeconomic background had a significant effect on both emotion awareness and vocabulary whereas gender did not. Qualitative analysis revealed diverse grammatical types to describe emotions, except idioms, as well as the presence of body-related emotion vocabulary within children's records. Finally, a high prevalence of emotion words such as "happy" and "sad" was subject to further cross-cultural review.