Stati di malessere e di benessere: cosa ne pensano i bambini?

The aim of this work was to investigate some aspects of children’s conceptualization of suffering and well-being, states which are implied in either negative or positive events in their daily life. Knowledge of children’s representation of negative and positive states can be useful to set priorities in educational contexts toward a greater awareness of one’s internal state and to design adequate prevention programs. Many studies dealt with children’s memory of events associated with negative and positive affect (Fivush, 1998) as a way for children to create meaning and cope with such experiences, but only a few compared directly the narratives of negative and positive events (Fivush, Hazzard, McDermott Sales, Sarfati, & Brown, 2003). However, these studies did not address the issue of whether children’s narratives of negative and positive events are related to either physical or psychological states. Moreover, children’s conception of physical negative states focusing on health and illness was investigated (Schmidt & Fröhling, 2000), but a comparison between a conception of physical vs. mental negative states was not drawn. Furthermore, children’s emerging ability to integrate physical and psychological domains was recently examined (Notaro, Gelman, & Zimmerman, 2002), but only negative states were considered. Thus, the general purpose of this work was to analyse how children of various ages differed in their way of representing states related to suffering and well-being. One of the main interests was to observe whether negative and positive states were conceptualized as symmetrical or asymmetrical concepts. Moreover, we aimed at investigating children’s ability to interrelate aspects belonging to physical and psychological domains. So, we focused on 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children’s ability to characterize negative and positive states in physical and psychological terms. In Study 1 this issue was addressed by examining how children (N = 112) narrated personal events associated with negative states, prompted by four different labels, linked either to physical (to fall ill, to get hurt), psychological (to feel let down) or general suffering (to feel bad); the last label allowed children to freely choose to narrate either a physical or psychological event. In Study 2, children (N = 60) narrated six personal events prompted by labels linked to (a) negative (to feel bad) or positive (to feel good) experiences; (b) negative or positive experiences associated with physical or psychological domain (to feel bad in the body, to feel bad inside, to feel good in the body, to feel good inside). In Study 3 (N = 60), children’s conception was further explored by proposing a task based on a more abstract kind of knowledge, asking to define linguistic expressions referring to negative or positive internal states, and to give examples related to them. In these studies, data were coded according to different dimensions, among which reference to physical and psychological states, and presence of causes, description of the state, consequences. Finally, in Study 4 we investigated whether children (N = 60) were able to identify dimensions underlying stimuli characterized by different affective tone (negative, positive) and domain (physical, psychological). Findings shed some light regarding the study of asymmetry in children’s conceptions of suffering and well-being. From the information concerning the salience of the domain, a more marked tendency toward asymmetry appears to characterize the younger children compared to the older ones. The former children invoke physical states more often when thinking about negative states than when dealing with positive states. Nine-year-olds’ representation of negative states was more frequently characterized by psychological aspects compared to younger children, for both states. This result could underline children’s growing ability either to deal with psychological aspects or to build a more complex concept of negative states. Moreover, the presence of both physical and psychological causes and consequences within the same event and definition seems to suggest an initial ability to interrelate body and mind states, probably more salient for negative events. Results are discussed also in terms of advantages of naturalistic methods, such as narration of personal events, on investigating the representation underlying negative and positive states in children.