Abstract:

Introduction:
Emotional development represents a fundamental area for building an individual's personality. Several factors combine to complete this process: temperament, theory of mind (ToM), mirroring and reflective functions, and emotional regulation. All these elements integrating allow the child to complete the process of affective mentalization. Early autobiographical narratives are a means of symbolic reconstruction. In fact, the child supports his own autobiographical Self through autobiographical narration. In children aged 4 to 6 it may be important to support emotional competence through storytelling. In our study we wanted to evaluate the impact of storytelling on emotional recognition in children between 4 and 5 years old.

Methodology:
36 children from a school in Caserta aged between 4 and 5 were recruited. They were divided into two random groups of 18: Gr1 and Gr2. At T0 everyone was administered a test containing 32 images referring to primary and secondary emotions. Subsequently, the two groups Gr1 and Gr2 worked on primary and secondary emotions: Gr1 through laboratory teaching and Gr2 through the Storytelling technique.

Results:
The Gr2 group at T1 after a month of working on emotions showed greater competence in recognizing emotions.

Conclusions:
Storytelling proves to be a good strategy for working on the process of emotional recognition and regulation and in teaching it can support emotional literacy processes.

Keywords:

Storytelling, Theory of Mind (ToM), Emotional Regulation.