Fifty-six children, aged 5 to 11 years, were presented with a set of plastic play people. Scenarios were enacted using the toys to elicit emotion-descriptive vocabulary in response to the interviewer's question, "How do you think she/he feels about that?" Eight adult subjects participated as a control. The study shows that children under the age of 8 years have a limited repertoire of labels to describe emotions. Even 11-year-olds are unable to produce vocabulary that expresses concepts of emotion described by adults. The children interviewed in this research were assumed to not have been abused, and the game involved them diving objective opinions about the emotional states of a set of toys rather than having to speak subjectively about their feelings in relation to their own experiences of abuse; therefore, it is likely that the children in a neutral environment performed better than they would in an alleged abuse interview situation in a nonneutral environment. Based on these findings, the authors conclude that professionals must be careful in their use of questions that seek descriptions of emotions from young children; rather than achieving the intent of revealing how distressing the child found the abuse, such questions may promote the impression that the child is not linguistically competent to provide any evidence. For a critique of this study and its conclusions, see NCJ-170902. 16 references and 4 tables