Longitudinal study of mixed emotions in 5-6 and 7-8 year old children: the cognitive aspect

Background. This article presents data from a longitudinal study of understanding mixed emotion in preschool and primary school-age children, as well as the relationship of emotion understanding to the development of thinking. Understanding mixed emotions is viewed as children's ability to recognize and interpret emotions consisting of two simultaneous emotions of different valences. In contrast to the majority of other works following Piaget's theory, our work, follows the structural-dialectical approach and examines how the understanding of mixed emotions is connected not only to formal operations, but also to dialectical actions which allow us to look into the way a child forms the unity of two opposite emotions.

Objective of the study was to analyze how understanding mixed emotions develops in children aged 5-6 and 7-8 and to assess the nature of changes in the relationship between understanding mixed emotions and indicators of cognitive development in these two age groups.

Sample. Data were obtained by diagnosing 80 children, including 42 boys (52.5%) between 2019 and 2022.

Methods. Preschoolers’ understanding of mixed emotions was assessed using a set of tasks consisting of three stories whose characters experienced atypical emotional experiences (Veraksa et al., 2022a). To diagnose the formal-logical thinking, the Probability, Scale and Cylinder methods (Piaget, Inhelder, 1951; Piaget et al., 1948), which were part of the classic Piaget tests, were applied. The development of dialectical thinking was assessed with the techniques “Drawing an Unusual Tree”, “What can be at the same time?”, and “Cycles” (Veraksa et al., 2022b).

Results. Analysis revealed that children in the first grade were more successful in completing mixed emotion tasks than children in the older preschool group. It was found that the success in comprehension tasks for mixed emotions among older preschoolers and first graders was related to the development of multiplication operations (formal-logical operations) and operations of mediation, serialization, and reference (dialectical operations).

Conclusion. The peculiarities of the connection between the understanding of mixed emotions and the development of formal and dialectical thinking in children aged 5-6 and 7-8 were revealed.

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