L'autocomprensione affettiva. Una ricerca a scuola

The purpose of this study was to investigate the value of emotional education in order to address the problem of “emotional illiteracy”. Emotional illiteracy means people’s incapability or difficulty in recognizing, expressing and managing their emotional life. This study implies the realization of an educative experience on emotions for children and the development of research on this educative experience. Participants were children in four fourth classes of three primary schools in Verona. The organization of the educative path was aimed at facilitating the children’s reflections on their emotions. The research on the educative path was guided by the following research question: “What ways of affective self-understanding emerge from an educative experience that is structured on the basis of a cognitive conception of emotions?” Some phenomenologists (Scheler, 2008, 2013; Stein, 2000a, 2001, 2005; Pfänder, 2002; De Monticelli, 2008a; Mortari, 2002, 2006b, 2009a, 2013a) highlight the importance of the emotional life. Starting from their perspective, in this work the following thesis about emotional education is sustained: emotional education is important because emotional growth is a constitutive aspect of personal growth, and emotional experience influences our ways of being, living and relating to others. Another thesis sustained in this work is that emotional education is conceivable in the light of a cognitive conception of emotion (Nussbaum, 1998, 2004; Oatley, 1997; Harris, 1991; Ellis, 1993a, 1993b). Since emotions have cognitive contents (beliefs or appraisals), they can be understood by the person who feels them. Starting from this premise, the educative experience developed in this study considers the following proposition: “emotional illiteracy” can be addressed since the early levels of schooling by facilitating people’s engagement in “affective self-understanding” (Mortari, 2009a, 2015), where affective self-understanding is conceived as a practice of self-knowledge applied to the emotional life. During the educative path, the children were required to write and analyse their emotions in a personal journal titled the “journal of emotional life” (Mortari, 2015). In their journal, the children had to write a narrative about an emotion they felt during the day and analyse it on the basis of a metaphor. The metaphor is the “vegetable garden of emotions” (invented by Mortari for this research); according to this metaphor, every emotion is associated with a vegetable plant. The use of this metaphor was aimed at facilitating the children’s recognition of the fact which gave rise to an emotion, the manifestations of this emotion and the thoughts linked to it. The children’s writings were analysed on the basis of a phenomenological and inductive approach (Mortari, 2006b, 2007, 2009b). The study’s results allow identification of some elements in the way in which the children develop their affective self-understanding: - the cognitive operations that were required of the children for the analysis of their emotions; that is to say, the recognition of: the fact which gives rise to the emotion; the manifestations through which the emotion eventually expresses itself; the thoughts which are linked with the emotion; - the recognition of the intensity of the experienced emotion; - the recognition of the desire or unwillingness that can accompany the emotion; - the recognition of an additional emotion. From the children’s perspective, it is significant to point out that they perceived the acquisition of personal knowledge of their affective life, the ability to express and write about their emotions, the emotional lexicon and the competence of self-analysis.