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We investigated whether conversational intervention focused on emotions could promote the development of emotion comprehension (EC), theory of mind (ToM), and prosocial orientation in preschoolers. Seventy-five 4-to 5-year-old children (M age at pre-test: 5 years and 1 month; standard deviation = 6.83 months), assigned to experimental and control conditions, were pre-and post-tested for verbal ability, EC, falsebelief understanding, and prosocial orientation. Over a 6-week intervention, all children were presented with brief illustrated scenarios based on emotional scripts. The training group was then involved in conversations about the nature, causes, and regulation of emotion whereas the control group engaged in free play, where conversation was minimized. The training group outperformed the control group in EC and prosocial orientation, even after controlling for gains in verbal ability whereas no differences were found for children's false-belief understanding. The positive effect remained stable over time. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c tThis study investigates the relationship between mental-state language and theory of mind in primary school children. The participants were 110 primary school students (mean age = 9 years and 7 months; SD = 12.7 months). They were evenly divided by gender and belonged to two age groups (8-and 10-year-olds). Linguistic, metacognitive and cognitive measures were used to assess the following competencies: verbal ability, use of mental-state terms, understanding of metacognitive language, understanding of second-order false beliefs, and emotion comprehension. Correlations between children' use of mental-state language and their performance on theory-of-mind tasks were moderate, whereas correlations between children's comprehension of such language and ToM abilities were high. In addition, regression analyses showed that comprehension of metacognitive language was the variable which best explained children's performance on both false belief tasks and an emotion comprehension test when verbal ability and age were controlled for.

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