La conoscenza delle emozioni nei bambini in eta' scolare

The study analyzed children's knowledge of three basic emotions: happiness, sadness and anger. Subjects (N= 139, subdivided into 2 age groups: 8.2 and 12.2 years old) were asked twice to report an event they had personally experienced for each emotion, once orally, and once in written form. The qualitative and quantitative analyses that were carried out on children’s reports showed that: a) children's representation of emotional experiences is very complex, and comprises several components; b) the richness of the representation, and the specific kinds of concepts that children express develop as a function of age; c) the representation of emotional experience comprises profiles that are typical of each emotion; d) in their description of a few components of the emotional experience, younger subjects show a greater easiness when talking than when writing about it, whereas older subjects display the opposite trend. On the whole, the obtained results suggest that an indirect method of data collection, coupled with the use of analytic coding scheme allows us to detect very important aspects of children’s emotional knowledge that were somewhat neglected in previous studies.