In my diploma paper, I identified the child's feelings, described their characteristics and explained the understanding of their emotions. In particular, I looked into the emotion of anger in children of preschool age. As a future educator, I reviewed literature which describes how teachers can help children express their anger effectively.
In the empirical part of the thesis I investigated the situations in which kindergarten children express anger and how they do it. I have also been interested in the differences in the expression of anger among the children of different ages and sexes. I was also interested in how the educators and other children responded to a child’s anger. The study included 49 children from different Slovenian regions, 20 children from the first age group (up to 3 years) and 29 children from other age groups (from 3 years up to school age). Altogether there were 18 girls and 31 boys.
Children expressed the emotion of anger in 72 cases. Following my research, I have found that most children express the feeling of anger when they are deprived of a particular object. All children express anger with various expressions and body language. A large proportion of these children also expressed their anger with aggressive behaviour towards other children. I have not confirmed any differences in the expression of anger between the sexes and between age groups. Educators have most commonly moralized the child and other children usually responded with accompanying the conflict. The children were not prone to show sympathy when an expression of anger came about.
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