Pupils at school experience and express both pleasant and unpleasant emotions on a daily basis, and the latter also include fear and sadness, which we studied in more detail in the master's thesis. In the empirical part of the master's thesis, we focused on research on the experience and expression of fear and sadness in students from 1st to 5th grade of primary school. It included 114 students from more than 70 different Slovenian primary schools. Based on the observation scheme (Smrtnik Vitulić and Prosen, 2016), we observed the selected student throughout the school day. In doing so, we recorded their emotions and the situations in which they experienced and expressed emotions, ways of verbally responding to emotions, and the responses of teachers and classmates to a student’s emotions. In order to deepen our research, we also conducted an interview with twelve 4th and 5th grade students about experiencing and expressing fear and sadness at school. In the interview, students were asked about the situations in which they experienced fear or sadness at school, about their experience and opinion about fear or sadness, the intensity of experiencing fear or sadness and the reactions of teachers and classmates to their fear and their sadness. The results of the observation and interview showed that fear and sadness were triggered in the students by different situations. The most common reason for experiencing and expressing fear in students was assessment, and the most common reason for experiencing and expressing sadness in students was when they were scolded by the teacher (but only when observing emotions). Based on the results of the observation and interview, we found out that teachers and classmates responded differently to the fear or sadness of students both verbally and non-verbally; however, when we used the observation method, we observed even more diverse responses from teachers and classmates. The results of the interview showed that most of the students clearly described the experience of fear, and most of them did not know how to articulate the experience of sadness. According to the results of the interview, when experiencing and expressing fear or sadness, the students thought differently and experienced it differently: fear moderately intense, and sadness intensely. The results of the observation showed that students experienced and expressed sadness twice as often as fear. The results provide a better understanding of the experience and expression of unpleasant feelings of fear and sadness in students in grades from 1st to 5th grade of primary school and help teachers and other primary school professionals address these emotions in children.
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