Emotions can be a really hard stimulus to deal with because it is your reaction to something that happens to you. When you can not figure out how to verbalize exactly how you feel because you do not know what you're feeling, it can be very overwhelming to anyone.
This intervention was inspired by Disney Pixar's movie Inside Out, which was released in summer of 2015. If you have not seen it yet I highly recommend it as it gives a very interesting insight to how the primary emotions function. The writers consulted with several psychologists who determined that the main emotions that a person has are Joy, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, and Fear. Of course this isn't all the feelings that someone can have. The more I thought about it the more I realized that the many different feelings that we can have branch off from the emotions depicted in the movie. To make my thought process more visual I have included a tree diagram.
So the primary emotion would be the colored word and the feeling would be the words underneath. Its not to say that you wouldn't be able to feel a colored emotion because you certainly could. This is just how I chose to categorize it based on the images I used for the visuals and the emotions I thought kids would be able to understand and verbalize easily.
I printed out visuals of the characters from the films from these websites and colored them in (yay for therapeutic adult coloring time!).
Joy: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/fb/88/c7/fb88c7ad5b4d91b244b440e7fd63db0a.jpg
Sadness: http://www.colouring-page.org/sites/default/files/inside-out-coloring-pages-11.jpg
Anger: http://www.disneyclips.com/funstuff/imagestsgab8/insideout_anger_coloring.gif
Disgust: http://www.colouring-page.org/sites/default/files/inside-out-coloring-pages-03.jpg
Fear: http://mommyscene.com/images/blog/coloring-pages/disney-inside-out-fear-coloring-page.jpg
After I had colored them in I came up with the song and chord accompaniment and created my file folder.
Depending on what you're working on with the child you can adapt for many different uses and scaffold it until you are able to use the intervention for the original purpose.
The first tier of this intervention is to work on the ability to recognize the emotions. You can start with just having the client verbalize how each character is feeling in the picture.
Once the child has mastered the first tier of this intervention you can begin having them describe what that feeling means to them and what are some things that make them feel the same way as the character.
After this, you would have the child pick a character that they are identifying with that day and place it above the "I feel" part of the file folder. You can also show them visuals of the spelled out emotion if they are able to read to reinforce by matching the linguistic visual to the picture visual.
Once the client/child is able to accurately identify how they are feeling with he written linguistic aid combined with the picture visual, you can fade out the picture visual and just have them verbalize the linguistic visual. The way I created my written words was scaffolded as well, I had words that were in the colors that matched the characters so it would be easy to identify and match the word to the pictures and I also created written visuals of the word in black that could be used as the child became more successful at identifying and verbalizing the correct emotion.
When the child can successfully tell you how they are feeling you can move to asking them why they are feeling that way and what happened to make them feel that way. Using the opposite side of the folder.
If they are able to do so, ask them to identify what they can do next time if something happens that makes them feel mad or upset. Obviously if the child says that they feel happy or another "yellow" emotion you don't want to ask them what they can do differently but you can ask them to verbalize why they are feeling happy and what they can do to show others that they feel happy and share the happy feeling. You can even have the child choose instruments and play how they are feeling. If you are working with a group you can have the others try to guess what feeling the child was playing.
I think there are a lot of possibilities you have available to you with this intervention to help a child practice recognizing and validating their own emotions as well as others. Please feel free to use this in your own sessions/interactions with children and let me know if you are successful or if you have any thoughts on how to expand upon it!
"Music speaks what cannot be expressed, soothes the mind and gives it rest, heals the heart and makes it whole, flows from heaven to the soul."
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