The purpose of our study was to determine age-related differences in understanding emotions in middle and late childhood and early adolescence. We wanted to determine whether children aged 7, 9 and 11 (N = 54) differed in the complexity of their understanding of individual areas of basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear in other people and whether their understanding depended on their gender and the educational background of their parents. Children gave answers in a semi-structured interview specifically designed for this study. Based on the results obtained from qualitative and quantitative analysis and their consistency with the findings of other researchers, we concluded that 1) in middle and late childhood and early adolescence the understanding of basic emotions increases in complexity and that changes do not occur in all areas simultaneously; 2) the four basic emotions develop gradually, with more complex interpretations being added to simpler ones; 3) there are no characteristic gender-based differences in the complexity of understanding in most areas of emotion nor are there any differences between children and adolescents with parents of different educational backgrounds.
The present study analyses the social representation of women and men in ten contemporary Slovak musical films aimed at children (Spievankovo, Fíha-tralala, Smejko a Tanculienka). An analysis of the internal and external features attributed to “men”, “women”, “boys”, and “girls” has revealed, in line with previous research, that men are associated with strength and courage and women with beauty and care. Gender also determines clothing, props. Contrary to previous findings, women in the analysed films, more often than men, display activity and dominance and take the role of moral and intellectual authorities. Men, on the other hand, are just as emotional as women. In conclusion, the author proposes a hypothesis to explain these discrepancies with the previous research.
Children's speech perception strategies, together with speech production, start developing from the very beginning of language acquisition. In the case of children exhibiting usual (normal) qualitative and quantitative changes, no dissociation is assumed between speaking and speech processing. However, observational data show that children's speech production may go on working properly for quite some time even if there is some hidden impairment in their speech processing abilities. This usually leads to learning difficulties and restricted cognitive operations. Little is known, furthermore, about the expected age-bound working of speech processing performance or indeed about the line of development and its characteristics. In a series of experiments, the authors have sought answers to a number of questions: (i) What level do the speech perception and comprehension processes under scrutiny reach between ages 4 and 9? (ii) What interrelationships do they exhibit? (iii) Exactly how can the fact of development be pinpointed? Test results of a total of 600 children (altogether over fifty thousand data) have been analysed with respect to speech perception and speech comprehension processes. The results have confirmed a particular cooperation among the individual perceptual processes: development can be accounted for in terms of a decrease of interconnections among various types of processing. The older the child is, the more pronounced the mutual independence of perceptual processes is, and that is what underlies the proper functioning of the whole mechanism.
The children in the face of Internet. The face of a virtual world has many aspects. The internet helps in many areas of life, it seems indispensable in the military, banking, economy, social information, education and even the contemporary Church cannot get rid of the evangelical and informative activity in a global network. But the internet is not only a place of accessible services, the most popular ones being WWW websites, electronic mail, Usenet, discussion lists or internet cafes. It is also an environment full of traps and dangers, a ‘legal’, in the face of law, school of ‘anti-education’ and spreading of ‘anti-values’, especially if we take into account the fact that children and youth constitute the most devout and the most defenseless society of the internet recipients. Unlimited access to pornography, vulgarity and violence linked with a lack of efficient tools of controlling the website content, makes the internet a source of many examples of juvenile pathological behavior. Some people claim that the formative influence of the media on education competes on a rising scale with the influence of school, the Church and even a family. Benedict XVI in his message for XLI Communications Day 2007 stresses that a relationship: children – media – education should be considered from two perspectives: the formation of children by the media and the formation of children to respond appropriately to the media. In this question the Pope points at a specific interdependence between a responsibility of the media and a need of active and critical attitude of media broadcast recipients. In this way a preparation for a responsible exploitation of the media seems to be an important task for a cultural, moral and spiritual development of children and youth. It is an extremely difficult task as it is clearly visible that the internet addiction will become a genuine plague in the 21 century.
This article critically examines the Hero’s Journey arc, popular in affective bibliotherapy for children and young people. Privileging this archetypal model of resilience represses and excludes difference. It posits two alternatives, foregrounding characters who face additional cultural, social, and political factors that hinder their capacity to act, and argues that bibliotherapy must be inclusive, incorporating stories that offer alternative depictions of resilience that are complicated, messy, and non-linear but no less “heroic”.
The literature for the children of Vojvodina Slovaks living in Serbia first received attention in year 1968, when it was prompted by magazine Nový život as a part of the Literárna porada discussion. Another of such discussions called Naša detská poézia po oslobodení /Our children´s poetry after the liberation/ took place in 1983, where children´s literature was seen as the most important line of the literary production written by Slovaks living in Serbia. Between 1996 and 2015 Slovak Vojvodina literature for children underwent development in all the forms (poetry, prose, drama) and genres. In addition, the professional reflection on children´s literature improved, too (Pavol Mučaji: Podľa duše dieťaťa /In Line with A Child´s Soul, 2005; Jarmila Hodoličová: Prehľad dejín slovenskej vojvodinskej prózy pre deti /A Concise History of Slovak-language Vojvodina Prose for Children, 2005).
The article presents the outcomes of a research study on the ways schools and the system of education in Poland in general approaches poverty and pupils from poor families. The research shows the Polish school as oriented towards satisfaction of current needs of poor children, such as free meals, rather than on long term, developmental ones. In the light of gathered data the Polish school is not a place of social integration and does not teach the values of equality and human solidarity. It also does not support the process of education of poor children and youth. Its certain features (domination of teaching function over upbringing and child care, overly large classes and schools etc.) and practices (segregation, labelling stigmatisation, exclusion) are especially disadvantageous for poor children and youngsters.
This study deals with the fairy-tale opera, Rozprávka o šťastnom konci [A Tale of a Happy End] (2019), of the Slovak composer Peter Zagar, commissioned by the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. Although this is Zagar’s only opera so far, the composer has ample experience in dramatic composition, as he has composed music for dramatic and ballet/dance productions and soundtracks for movies. The study discusses not only the dramaturgical structure and the music of the opera, and the specificities of its performance, but also points out the pitfalls of opera production for children and the importance of musical-intellectual education.
Fluid intelligence is a critical factor in learning and instruction. It also influences performance at school and in the workplace. There have been many attempts to directly and indirectly improve general fluid intelligence by training its underlying cognitive functions, such as working memory, cognitive control, or attention. The aim of the present study was to determine the extent to which school-age children’s scores on intelligence tests could be improved by attention training. After training sessions, which consisted of four computerized cognitive tasks that practiced various aspects of attention, the children’s scores on an attention test improved, with fewer false alarms and increased performance speed. This improvement partially persisted over an extended period of time. However, this effect was not associated with higher intelligence test scores. These results suggest that attention is possible to develop through short-term interventions but general intelligence is not. We interpret our findings in terms of the three-stratum theory of human intelligence.
The author deals with aesthetic quality „children’s aspect of expression”. She focuses on its characteristic from the point of view of musical creator. She enumerates specification of music for children and at the same time she suggests, what picture of child in art brings and represents. She thinks about artistic value of children creation. She confronts experiences from reflection of musical work with ideas of scientists, pedagogues, and artists.
In December 2008 Polish Honorary Consul and the Authorities of Barcelona prepared a meeting to commemorate the story of a group of Polish children that found a shelter in Catalonia after WW II. During the war about one hundred Polish children were taken from their parents to The Third Reich. According to the disgraceful project 'Lebensborn', they were being germanised. In 1946 Red Cross took them to Barcelona, where - in spite of economic problems - they could at last learn Polish culture. Wanda Tozer, The Secretary of Polish Honorary Consul, made the most for the children's education and material help. 62 years later it was extremely difficult to find out what happened with these Polish children. It is probably the very last moment to conduct the study, to find some sources, to interview the 'children' and to illuminate the story
The article reflects various social-cultural contexts of social projection of child. Based on everyday visual culture it points to the changes of collective consciousness of child. Present-day 'disneyfication' leads towards specific social phenomena as for example 'The paradoxon of friendly adultism', which is related to certain risks in upbringing and relationships. The paradox emphasizes the difference between the status of children in contemporary collective sense and their real possibilities of development.
This article aims to present an empirical investigation of six- to seven-year-old children’s free word associations in Slovak. The empirical data analysed in this article were collected via lexical decision task, a method used within the qualitative research design. The data analysis indicates the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift in children’s word associations to stimulus nouns. In syntagmatic response to stimulus noun, the children produce either free verbal sequences or defining characteristics of a stimulus word (activity characteristics and descriptive attributes). In paradigmatic response to stimulus noun, the children produce semantically diverse associations, mostly in the following semantic categories: location or local proximity, inclusive parts, more distant meaning, word-formation paradigm, and coordinates. Despite the research limitations, the present results are consistent with the previous research findings in the field of children’s word associations in both Slovak and other languages.
The presented paper sets a goal to defend the concept of the meditative fairy tale amongst the other existing genres of the literary fairy tale. The introduction includes the description of the contemporary ununified genre classification of literary fairy tales at home and abroad. Its comparison with the genre of the philosophical fairy tale leads to reflecting on the meditative fairy tale as an autonomous genre in literature for children and youth and it points out its specific tendencies towards the „sacrum“ space. The paper makes an attempt to define these writings against abackground of the ideas formulated by the Romanian religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade and the contemporary research in the field of literature for children (Andričíková, Kubeczková, Magalová and others). Reading meditative fairy tales is recommended to all age groups. It presents a literary text of an intimate atmosphere for readers of all ages, where every human emotion comes to life – including the serious, gloomy, cheerless ones, which are rarely employed in literature for children. In the conclusion, the paper suggests new possible ways of looking at the evolution of the literary fairy tale in Slovakia against a background of the research into the „archetypical“ genre of the literary fairy tale – the fairy tale featuring Christian and didactic tendencies.
Article encourages research and new-fashioned projects focused on wider living conditions of children and young people with disabilities based on their human rights and promotes exchange of experience and good practices in this field. To stress importance of the mentioned effort the authoress analyses selected facts about living conditions of children with disabilities. She develops psychology-based polemic to premises about special needs of children and young people with disabilities, and presents the demands-based approach to human needs based on social-right model of disability. Second part of the study pays attention to situation in Slovakia - incidence of disability among children and some structural features of the Slovak disability research with emphasizing the research work focused on the field of education.
Can we give a simple answer to the question which segment of book is more important? Is it its visual appearance or its textual content? Some people surely can. Readers, though, see it differently. They see book as a whole, so it should be seen as a whole even in the process of its creation. In the model situation the artist and the author of the text would have the same artistic intention, or even better, they would be one person. A question of form and content of a book is widely explored in the phenomenon of artist’s book. It is usually made by a single author who presents through it his or her artistic self or comments on certain aspect of objective reality. The artist’s book has already entered the realm of children’s book, with all its specificity. The artist’s book for children could, thus, lead to a better interaction between author and percipient. Attempts of such kind can be found in our book market under the name of so called collector’s books.
This study aims to examine more closely the child´s conception of kinship and thus to clarify, particularly for the adult reader, how children perceive the family and kinship, how they construct their idea of the abstract kinship network, whom they include among their nearest kin, and why. The work should also to some extent fill blank spaces in the series of research projects on the family whose scale of respondents is aimed purely at child informants, because in acquiring the necessary data I cooperated with and made use of the knowledge of 10 children in pre-school age (5-7). Results confirm that children have all the assumed knowledge about kinship and the ability to employ kinship terms correctly in practice, and they make use of this ability. In conclusion, I can only hope that my work will stimulate others also to do research with children.
The issue of the educational system should be one of the main points in the discussion about the integration, assimilation of immigrants, and multicultural societies. Since the introduction of compulsory schooling, the school became one of the main instruments to integrate the young generation into a society and culture, to provide the most equal opportunities for individual development, to acquire knowledge, skills or professional qualifications. On the macro-level we are asking if the educational system works properly in the society as a whole. On the mezzo-level, the problems of local communities and individual schools are raised. Finally, on the micro-level, we consider the needs of individual pupils or classes, their educational opportunities, aspirations and motivations, but also their feeling of discrimination.
The assumption in this research project was that children in the context of their social group form their own rules and hierarchy, and that precisely this hierarchy in the children´s group has the greatest influence on the character and content of the ideas about social groups which are disseminated among children. Fieldwork has confirmed that children´s knowledge is influenced most of all by the structure of the children´s peer group. Apart from cognitive reasons (it is easier to learn from a similar mind) there are also social reasons- children are very social and for them it is important to be a part of the group where they feel comfortable and which they understand.
The article presents toys as meaningful reflections of culture, which, while being a tool in the process of culturalisation, transmit some cultural content, meaningful to the society that has produced them. The role a toy plays in the process of internalisation of gender roles is an important aspect of its ideological character. The studies on toys and play reveal some general characteristics of the process of culturalisation - e.g. the differences between what is expected of girls and boys. They also show some inconsistencies between the declared and real awareness of gender equality.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.