Children’s Affective Self-Understanding: An Educative Research in Primary School

Our time is characterized by an increasing of emotional malaise (Benasayag & Schmit, 2003) and by the phenomenon of ―emotional illiteracy‖ (Goleman, 1995). This situation makes evident that there is a need of emotional education that facilitates people to entertain a conscious relationship with their own emotional life starting from the first levels of schooling. Our proposal is that the cognitive conception of emotions, according to which emotions are strictly connected with cognitive elements (Ellis, 1990; Harris, 1989; Oatley, 1992), can be the theoretical basis of an educative experience aimed at educating children to the practice of affective self-understanding (Mortari, 2015). On the basis of this premise, we have firstly designed an educative project aimed at facilitating children to understand their own emotions and then we have carried out a qualitative research on it. The research question was the following: what ways of affective self-understanding emerge from an educative experience structured on the basis of a cognitive conception of emotions? The research involved 45 nine to ten year olds children of four fourth grade classes of Italian primary schools. The educative path implied nine meetings between the classes and the researcher, with the organization of different type of activities, such as reading of stories, conversations and also a game