Interpreting of Children's Emotions by Mothers Living in St. Petersburg (RF)

Abstract

The article is devoted to recognition of child's emotions in Russian mother sample. 80 mothers living in Saint- Petersburg took part in research. For studying of recognition of facial emotions of children the «IFEEL Pictures» method was used. The results of this research lead us to the following conclusions: the words used by Russian mothers in order to classify emotions displayed in photographs of children's faces can be grouped together in categories according to their semantics and according to their placement on the scales of arousal and hedonic tone; the lexicon of emotional words, used by Russian mothers to describe emotions displayed in photographs of children's faces differ from those employed by American mothers in terms of the content and significance of emotional categories and their placement on the scales of arousal and tone; level of arousal for positive and negative emotional categories depends on mother's education and family income.