Labeling Emotions in a Motor Speech Session

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. I wanted to give a little context to the post we did last week about labeling emotions in your pediatric motor speech therapy sessions. I'm going to share something that happened in a session last week, but honestly, it happens fairly frequently.

I have a little boy I'm working with who has a lot of language and a lot to say, and he's highly unintelligible. We were having a good session, in the middle of one of our blocks of practice, and he was saying a word I wasn't understanding. I tried to understand, and I wasn't getting it, and it was very clear to him that I wasn't getting it. I can't fake it with this kid. His mom, who sits in our sessions, wasn't understanding either. We gave it a really good try, and we didn't get it.

Then I started to bring him back into practicing. He was ready and willing to go again with another block of practice, but he was starting to tear up. I could have pushed through and probably gotten another really good block, but that's not what mattered in that moment. I saw him tearing up, and I said, "Hey, are you okay?" He just looked at me. And I said, "You feel frustrated. You have something you want to say, and it's frustrating not to be able to get your point across when you're trying over and over again, especially with people who care so much about you and are really trying to understand you."

He just looked at me, hopped into my lap, and gave me the biggest hug. He let me know that yes, he was frustrated. I could just tell it was like a weight lifted off his shoulders. We did eventually figure out he was trying to say "black hole," which there's no way I was getting. We are not talking about black holes in our sessions! So I was grateful we finally figured it out.

Here's what the research has shown about labeling our emotions. Very specifically, there were two groups of people. One group looked at highly emotional pictures of different scenes without saying anything. A second group looked at the same pictures but was instructed to label the emotion they were feeling while looking. This is Lieberman et al. What they found was that for the people who labeled the emotion, you saw activity light up in the prefrontal cortex while they were looking, and then you saw it diffuse when they said it.

And I swear, this is exactly what happens when you help a child label how they're feeling. In that moment, all of a sudden, he felt so much better. He felt seen. He felt understood. And then he was able to come right back in, and we had a very productive session after that.

I just wanted to share with you that it's okay to take a break in the middle of your session and talk about it. Sometimes it's a good session, like ours was, and sometimes it's not the best session. That's okay; it happens all the time. Progress is not linear. It's really important to have these moments so you can teach the child to label feelings within themselves, so they can feel better.

I hope that's helpful.