Sharing Tales That Teach: Shared Picturebook Reading for Early Childhood Emotional and Cognitive Development

Summary

Sharing Tales That Teach is a randomised study of a shared picturebook reading programme for 4- to 5-year-old children and their primary caregivers. The study will test whether a caregiver-delivered, emotion-focused shared reading programme leads to greater improvements in children's emotion regulation than a standard dialogic shared reading programme.

Emotion regulation refers to children's developing ability to understand, express and manage emotions in ways that support learning, relationships and wellbeing. These skills are closely linked with executive function, including children's ability to remember instructions, control impulses and shift flexibly between activities. Shared picturebook reading may provide a natural, low-cost way for caregivers to support these skills through everyday interaction.

Families in the randomised part of the study will be allocated to one of two 8-week shared reading programmes. In the emotion-focused group, caregivers will receive training in strategies such as naming emotions, discussing why characters feel as they do, talking about consequences of emotions and modelling ways to manage feelings. In the comparison group, caregivers will receive training in standard dialogic picturebook reading strategies, such as naming, describing, sequencing and asking open questions, without an explicit focus on emotions or emotion regulation. Both groups will use the same picturebooks and will be asked to complete three shared reading sessions per week at home.

The main hypothesis is that children in the emotion-focused shared reading group will show greater improvement in emotion regulation from baseline to 12-month follow-up than children in the standard dialogic shared reading group. The study will also examine whether the programme affects children's executive function, caregiver wellbeing and caregiver emotion regulation. Additional exploratory analyses will examine caregiver-child interaction processes and whether caregiver or child characteristics are associated with different intervention effects.

The study will recruit caregiver-child dyads through state primary schools in Greater London. Children will complete age-appropriate tasks and caregivers will complete questionnaires at baseline and follow-up. A laboratory subsample may also complete additional behavioural, observational and neurophysiological assessments. The study is low risk, non-invasive and does not involve medical treatment.

Conditions

• Child Development
• Executive Functions (EF)
• Emotion Regulation

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Emotion-Focused Shared Picturebook Reading

An 8-week caregiver-delivered shared picturebook reading programme designed to support emotion regulation in 4- to 5-year-old children. Caregivers receive standardised training materials, delivered through short instructional videos, introducing emotion-focused scaffolding strategies during shared reading. Strategies include emotion labelling, discussion of emotional causes and consequences, modelling of regulatory strategies and reflective questioning. Families are provided with age-appropriate picturebooks and asked to complete three shared reading sessions per week at home. Weekly feedback forms and audio recordings of the first and final sessions are used to support monitoring of engagement and fidelity.

BEHAVIORAL

Standard Dialogic Picturebook Reading

An 8-week caregiver-delivered shared picturebook reading programme used as an active comparator. Caregivers receive standardised training materials introducing dialogic and narrative reading strategies, including naming, describing, sequencing and encouraging child participation through open-ended questions. The comparator is matched to the emotion-focused intervention for duration, materials and caregiver involvement, but does not include explicit training in emotion recognition, emotional states or regulation strategies. Families use the same picturebooks as the experimental arm and are asked to complete three shared reading sessions per week at home.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Greenwich

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Benjamin RG Sigsworth, MSc · University of Greenwich

• Laura Katus, PhD · University of Greenwich

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

OTHER

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

48 Months

Max Age

59 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2026-09-30

Primary Completion

2028-08-01

Completion

2028-08-01

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations