In a school environment, children experience and express various emotions that affect their interpersonal relationships and academic performance. Therefore, the research of children's emotions in school environment is important, especially the emotions of children with mild intellectual disabilities (MID), which is a rather unexplored area. In the master's thesis, we focused on that area in pupils from the first to the fifth grade of primary school with an adapted programme with a lower educational standard. We carried out a study in which we observed the emotional expression of 62 pupils with MID using the observation scheme “Children’s emotions in a classroom” (Prosen & Smrtnik Vitulić, 2017) and conducted interviews with four teachers at primary school with an adapted programme with a lower educational standard.
Based on the results of the research, we found that pupils with MID express the following unpleasant emotions in the school environment: most often anger, then shame, fear, embarrassment, sadness, schadenfreude, envy, and disgust. On average, anger was expressed four times during the school day, shame once, and other emotions less than once. The pupils most often expressed anger due to a specific request from a teacher or due to noncompliance, shame due to the teacher's reprimand, fear due to failure, embarrassment due to exposure, sadness due to an unfulfilled wish or unachieved goal, schadenfreude due to a classmate's failure, envy due to a teacher's attention to a classmate and disgust with food. Between the period of middle (6–9 years) and late childhood (10–12 years), we found statistically significant differences only in the occurrence of sadness, which appeared more often in the middle childhood. There were no statistically significant gender differences in the occurrence of individual unpleasant emotions. We found that in most cases pupils did not express themselves verbally when expressing unpleasant emotions, but when they did, the most common verbal response was a command to someone else and a pupil’s remark or a comment. The most frequently observed non-verbal expression of the pupils was a gaze, often also frown and a gesture. Mostly, there was no response from classmates to the expressed emotions of the observed pupil. If a reaction did occur, the most common one was opposition or defence and consideration of the observed pupil’s emotional state. Even on the part of the teachers, most often, there was no response to the pupil’s expressed emotion, but if there was, it was an order or an instruction. The teacher also often responded with an explanation (of the situation), a verbal remark or by answering (the question) and by calming the pupil down. Teachers generally do not notice that pupils with MID recognize their own emotions. On the other hand, they observe that pupils recognize other people's emotions better than their own. According to them, pupils recognize only basic emotions, not complex ones. Teachers do not observe specific strategies for regulating unpleasant emotions in pupils. Pupils react impulsively in situations that provoke unpleasant emotions. Teachers find that the most effective strategy for learning about emotional regulation is learning directly from situations that occur in the classroom. In addition, they talk a lot about situations that happened to the children at home. Pupils are taught about emotions indirectly through the stories they read in class. They learn about emotions, emotional expressions, and situations of experiencing emotions through pictorial and video material. Teachers think it is important that they themselves are a good model of emotional regulation and that they regularly discuss this topic with parents.
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