Abstract:

Emotions are part of life. They influence social interactions, psychical atmosphere of particular surroundings, they are an important factor of our functioning. We experience emotions in everyday life, in particular in contacts with other people because all emotional reactions exist on a social basis. Particularly children learn emotions in interpersonal relations because social development determines their emotional development. Close interpersonal relations always create an emotional bond, full of love or hatred, pride or shame, sadness or happiness. In contacts with other people children have a chance to see not only how others deal with feelings and emotions, but also how their own manifestations of emotions influence others. From the point of view of social adaptation and mental health these experiences are the most important ones for children.

Awareness of experiences is closely related to the issue of their naming. Describing an emotion with the use of its name defines it in terms of its type and differentiates it. What vocabulary do the children have to define emotions? In the literature there is still no explicit resolution as far as this issue is concerned. Before children use a word, first they need to gather some experiences related to this part of reality that the word refers to. During development children move from collecting experiences in direct activities with some objects to use of words that refer to these objects. According to J. Piaget, a child creates knowledge about the world and language is a way to express this knowledge.

Recognizing emotional states of other people, ability to “read” their feelings on the basis of external behaviour is one of the conditions of social adaptation; it is an element of social relations. Understanding emotions on the basis of their external signs and understanding feelings of particular person who behaves in a specific way allow children to adopt a right behaviour. It is difficult for adults to define emotions and it is even more difficult for children.

The research, which used interviews with children and work cards, was conducted among children in younger years (1, 2 and 3) of primary school in Częstochowa, Poland in winter term in the school year 2018/2019 and also in Prešov, Slovakia. The children were interviewed by students of the Faculty of Early Childhood Education at Jan Dlugosz University in Częstochowa and students from the Department of Pre school and Elementary Pedagogy and Psychology at University of Prešov.

The goal of the study was to learn whether children could adequately decode mimic expressions of emotions, whether they could indicate emotions in the context and who identified mimic expression more accurately – girls or boys?

The basic problem of the study concerned the course of change of cognitive representations of emotions. Within the scope of this problem following hypothesis have been distinguished: 1/ability to name emotions on the basis of their graphical symbols increases with age; 2/accuracy of emotions naming on the basis of situational illustrations depends on age, which is related to children’s experiences; 3/girls define and decode mimic and pantomimic expressions of emotions better than boys. The whole was subject to quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Keywords:

Emoticons, decoding of emotions, mimic expressions of the face, pantomimic expressions of emotions, context of emotions, desymbolisations.