Dialectical and formal thinking in the context of understanding emotions by young children

Abstract

Background. The article presents the results of a longitudinal study of the cognitive-emotional development of children from the standpoint of the structural-dialectical approach. The authors consider the indicators of the formation of dialectical and formal-logical thinking and their relationship with emotion understanding in the children of preschool and primary school age.

Objective of the study was to test the hypothesis about the relationship between the development of dialectical and formal operations and emotion understanding in the children aged 5–9 years.

Methods. To assess the formation of mental operations and emotion understanding in 5–9-year-old children, a special toolkit was developed. The structural-dialectical method of analysis was implemented to study the features of dialectical thinking and emotion understanding in the children of senior preschool and primary school age. Assessment of the formal thinking development was carried out in the context of the operational theory of intelligence developed by J. Piaget.

Sample. The study involved 50 children aged 5–9 years (56% boys and 44% girls), who were tested in the senior and preschool groups of kindergarten and then in the second grade of school.

Results. Two forms of dialectical transformations were found to exist: substantive and structural. The obtained results have shown that already at preschool age there are mechanisms which allow children to apply dialectical thinking operations together with formal-logical operations when solving tasks related to understanding of mixed emotions.

Conclusions. The results obtained confirmed the hypothesis about the existence of correlation of the dialectical and formal thinking with emotion understanding in the children of senior preschool and primary school age. In the course of studying the cognitive-emotional development of children in primary school, a trend was found associated with the transition from dialectical to formal-logical thinking. This result needs further investigating.

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