Compreensão emocional em crianças e crenças maternas sobre competência emocional

• Autor(a) principal: Souza, Ana Beatriz de Mota e
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/15401
• topic: Emotion; Emotional Competence; Socialization of Emotions; Competência Emocional; Socialização de Emoções; Psicologia Social; Emoção; Inteligência emocional; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA::PSICOLOGIA SOCIAL

Some approaches in psychology, especially evolutionary psychology, and neurosciences, have rescued the leading role of emotions in human life and investigated their impacts on cognitive processes, motivation, and action. However, in many cultural niches, cognitive7 abilities are listed as the capacities considered most relevant to determine how successful the individual will be in his or her social and work life. In this scenario, and thinking about child development, many parents are concerned with aspects related to the cognitive skills of their children and it is important to sensitize them about the importance of emotional development. Parental beliefs and goals related to the role of emotions in the lives of children shape the processes of socialization of emotion desired by the parents, showing what they think is the best path to the healthy development of their children. This study aimed to examine the emotional understanding in children and their relationship with maternal beliefs about emotional competence. The guiding hypothesis of the study is that mothers who assign a high degree of relevance to components of emotional competence have children who perform better in tasks related to the understanding of emotions. Twenty-five children, four to five years old, and their mothers participated in this study. The contacts with the participants were carried out in schools of the private network in the cities of Niterói and Rio de Janeiro. The Sociodemographic Data Identification Forms and a structured interview with five open questions were applied to the mothers, seeking to investigate what they thought about emotional capacities in children and their role in the emotional development of their children. In relation to children, two tasks were applied: a task of identifying emotions and a task of assigning and naming emotions to situations presented. Data analysis included quantitative and qualitative analyzes. Regarding the interview with the mothers, a thematic-categorial content analysis of the answers given to the five questions formulated, from which categories were extracted, was performed. Then the frequencies corresponding to each established category were calculated, and quantitative tests were implemented that were adequate to the objectives of the study. Children performed better on tasks involving recognition of facial expressions of emotions. In the interviews with the mothers, the capacities related to social interaction were the most frequent category of evocations (23%), as desired abilities to be acquired by the children, followed by capacities related to emotional competence (21%). Almost all mothers believe they can contribute to the emotional development of their children, emphasizing conversations about emotions as a strategy in this regard. The expression of emotions was the most valued skill, followed by emotional understanding. No significant correlation was found between the maternal age and the children's scores on the tasks performed. It is expected that this study may contribute to the broadening of the discussion about the importance of emotions for child development