Looking at displays of emotions in young children during conversational interaction with their peers and adult supervisors

The study uses Conversation Analysis to focus on naturally occurring intentions. This affords the opportunity to inspect and make observations of the patterns participants are making and what they say and do in the organisation of talk-in-interaction. The data comprises recordings from a television series called “The Secret Life of Four/Five Year old’s”. This is a documentary-style programme that follows a group of young children as they learn to navigate the world around them. There are Psychologists and Scientists who regularly intervene with their professional opinion explaining the children’s behaviour with the help of cameras fitted around the school and playground to capture how the children naturally behave and interact with others. I will look at particular scenarios where the children find themselves on the receiving end of complex emotions; these include disappointment, loneliness, anxiety, anger, inferiority, lack of empathy and fear. 

 

Previous research by Wootton (1997) suggests that children learn language as part of their ways to navigate successfully in their world; indeed, by ways of conversational means, they can adjust to different contexts and interactional formats successfully and rapidly. Emotional experiences grow significantly after the age of eighteen months and children can refer to their emotions when they are only three years old (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1992). The emotions the children in my data are feeling are still very new to them and are they are probably still unclear as to what they are feeling in particular and why. This is a reason to highlight the importance of observing how they handle their new-founded complex emotions and what they learn from their exposure to carry into their future. 

 

Furthermore, traditional research has shown that children are treated as surrogate members when it comes to their emotions (Hutchby & O’Reilly, 2010) and adult’s impose their own perspective on the children’s feelings rather than taking on board what the children claim to be feeling for themselves. My project thus aims to recognise the children’s agency through how they independently handle these complex emotions. The children in my data are given the chance to solve problems and conflicts for themselves, make their own mistakes and learn valuable life lessons. My goal is to provide evidence which shows that young children have both the knowledge and intelligence to do so independently.