Bulletin of the Faculty of Letters, Hosei University

児童期

感情表現

emotional literacy

children

emotional expressions

Studies of emotional literacy on children have suggested that children not only acquire a great deal of emotional vocabulary as they grow older, but they also express their emotions with a diversity of expressions. However, the correlation with age is not clear and there have been little studies that have examined whether children's emotional expressions differ assuming an interpersonal situation in scenarios which arouse positive emotions and scenarios which arouse negative emotions. Accordingly, this study on 513 elementary school children from the first to sixth grade revealed that the number of children's emotional expressions（emotional vocabulary, behavior and references to the situation, expressions of desire or demand, and expressions as questions）differs depending on the child's year in school, gender, and even the situation. As a result, it was found that girls made more references to emotions for any kind of emotional expression than boys, the number of references by first graders was lower compared to any other grade, and moreover, while the number of emotions themselves do not grow from the second grade onward, there were differences in the way emotions were expressed depending on the grade of the child, such as fifth graders often expressing questions. Additionally, it was revealed that the total number of references to emotion were larger under negative circumstances than positive circumstances, allowing for some interesting insights regarding emotional literacy. There is a need moving forward to accumulate more research to further the discussion on why such results were obtained.

102 文学部・人文科学研究科 ＞ 紀要 ＞ 法政大学文学部紀要 ＞ 73