Primary School Children's Emotional Intelligence

Abstract

Emotional intelligence is an extremely important tool used to solve certain issues of school activities and interpersonal relationships. The development of emotional intelligence becomes an educational goal starting from the earliest ages of children. The goals of the school subject “Personal Development”, included in the preschool and primary school curriculum, deal with the components of emotional intelligence. The interest shown in self-knowledge and the positive attitude towards themselves and the others, as well as the adequate expression of their emotions while interacting with both children and adults they know, are general skills which include emotional intelligence components. This survey is the result of a research carried out among students in the first grade of primary school concurrently with a training program intended to develop emotional abilities in children. The following methods were applied during this study: observation, talk, questionnaire, pedagogical experiment.Our intense educational activities were focused on concrete affective experiences, using suggestive didactical materials, combining the expression with the analysis of basic emotions, which helped children find slight differences between basic emotions and better identify the determining factors of these emotions.