A cultural-historical study of emotions in play: catharsis and perezhivanie in an institutional care setting

ABSTRACT

As a critical developmental goal, emotion regulation (ER) for young children in orphanages has yet to be fully understood. This paper explores how co-experiencing of dramatic interactions in playworlds supports a child’s resolution and regulation of emotions in an institutional care setting in China. 49 hours of video data were analysed with the cultural-historical concepts of catharsis and perezhivanie. Findings show that catharsis as a crucial aspect of ER development takes the form of a triadic relationship between emotions, imagination, and drama. Together they create conditions for the child to reorganize the person-environment unity, which helps shape the child’s further development.

Introduction

There is a consensus in the early childhood literature that the development of emotion regulation (ER), as a key aspect of social and emotional competence (Eisenberg, 2001), is crucial during the early years. An overwhelming body of evidence demonstrates that effective ER abilities in young children are connected with children’s emotional wellbeing, social relations, and academic performance. Being able to recognize and manage one’s emotions facilitates good mental health and self-esteem (Denham, 2006). Young children who can effectively regulate their emotions tend to be well accepted by their peers (Denham, 2006) and teachers (Graziano et al., 2007), have fewer behavior problems and better social competence (Eisenberg, 2001), and are more likely to engage with conflict resolution (Saarni et al., 2006). Competence in ER supports school readiness (Denham, 2006) and educational achievement (Denham et al., 2012). In contrast, delays and challenges in ER during early childhood are likely to lead to social rejection, learning difficulties, and elevated aggression (Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2004). In summary, ER has been recognized as a key developmental outcome in the early years, and it is especially important for children who live through diverse, and often disadvantaged, social situations (Perry & Gunnar, 2019).

One group of children at great risk are children living in institutional care settings, such as orphanages, and their emotional development is a major concern and area that require improvement (McCall, 2013). Although institutions vary greatly in their resources and quality of care, institutionally reared children tend to suffer from long-term, severe problems with ER development (Julian et al., 2019). Existing institution-based interventions vary greatly in their foci and characteristics. While the literature contains few interventions specifically targeting ER development, a number of interventions broadly aim at emotional development in early childhood. Examples include foster care placement (Nelson et al., 2007), implementation of a preschool curriculum (Sparling et al., 2005), structural change and staff training (USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008), caretaker-child dyadic relationship enhancement (McCall et al., 2010), and occupational therapy (Daunhauer et al., 2007). Collectively, as Julian et al. (2019) pointed out, most of them were short-term studies applied by specialists, rather than regular caregivers with ER training. Furthermore, the majority of the studies take an institutional perspective, but the child’s perspective and engagement in the interventions has yet to be valued. Therefore, this paper examines a child’s experience of emotions across the implementation of a collective play-based intervention in an orphanage.

Relevant to the focus of this paper is the finding in early childhood literature that sociodramatic play is beneficial for a child’s ER development, although it rarely takes a central role in institution-based interventions (Meng et al, 2022). Play has been found to be an especially effective tool for ER development for children facing foster care (Haight et al., 2006), hospitalization (Williams et al., 2019), and war and refugee crises (Gürle, 2018). Additionally, a growing body of literature acknowledges the role of the others in the children’s ER development through play, for example, parents (Ambrose, 2013), teachers (Bodrova & Leong, 2018), and peers (Choi & Ohm, 2018). However, most of these studies focused on correlation testing, often in a controlled environment. Thus, this study foregrounds the natural, everyday setting of an orphanage where the child’s interactions and engagement in play in relation to ER are examined.

Informed by cultural-historical theory, this paper is part of a larger study that investigated the process of ER development through a 10-week adult-children collective play project in an orphanage. ER develops as the child participates in social life, where the innate, biologically driven emotions are transformed into higher (conscious and regulated) forms (Vygotsky, 1999). As a crucial part of the child’s psychological structure, ER, or difficulties in ER, affects how they relates to the surrounding social world (Vygotsky, 1999), and shapes the next step in their developmental trajectory. In this article, we adopt Vygotsky’s (1967) theorization of play, in which creating an imaginary situation is the defining characteristic. This paper brings forward how the child experiences emotions through dynamic interactions with others in play in the everyday context of an orphanage in China. More specifically, we ask: How does co-experiencing of the dramatic moments in play create conditions for ER for children living in an institutional setting? This paper begins with a detailed presentation of two interrelated cultural-historical concepts, catharsis and perezhivanie, followed by the study design, findings, discussion, and conclusion.

Theoretical framework

To frame the study of the ER of a child growing up in an orphanage in China, we first introduce the concept of catharsis. Although Vygotsky (1971b) did not link catharsis directly to young children’s play, he briefly likened play with art, mainly because imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of both, and emotions evoked through them share a common origin. Thus, the concept of catharsis has the potential to advance our understanding of how children experience emotions in play, which helps answer the research question of this paper. Further, because theoretical concepts in cultural-historical theory are all interconnected as a system of concepts (Fleer, 2015), the concepts of emotions, imagination, and drama are presented to support the theorization of catharsis. Next, the relations between catharsis and perezhivanie are discussed for their analytical power in shedding light on the child’s process of play and ER.

The concept of catharsis

In the Psychology of Art, Vygotsky (1971b) argued that catharsis as “a complex transformation of feelings” (para. 31) is the essence of the emotional response to works of art. It arises because of a contradiction of emotions as people engage with artistic works, which keeps intensifying until eventually the conflicting emotions are released, resolved, and overcome at their peak (Vygotsky, 1971b). In discussing how catharsis was understood historically, Vygotsky drew our attention to Freud’s interpretation of the term in psychoanalysis. In the early stage of psychoanalysis, catharsis was viewed as part of a therapeutic method through which patients, with the help of a psychoanalyst, relives the traumatic events from the past and discharge the repressed emotions and internal conflicts (Dafermos, 2018). Catharsis was treated as an end of the emotions, leaving no further space for new. However, as Leontiev suggested, the way Vygotsky used the term went beyond mere release of tension and negative emotional energy and became a transformative concept, a vehicle to reshape human experience (Fróis, 2010). It is a natural means for all human beings, not just those inflicted with trauma, to process and regulate their preexisting emotions through works of art (Vygotsky, 1971b).

Catharsis and emotional transformation

Vygotsky defined emotion as “discharges and expenditures of unused energy” (Vygotsky, 1971a, para. 13), as the result of the inevitable imbalance between the individual and the environment. Citing Sherrington, he compared the human nervous system to a funnel whose wider end opens toward the environment and narrower end opens toward individual action. Only a small fraction of what we receive from the environment is released through our behaviors and expressions, leaving the great majority inside seeking an outlet (Vygotsky, 1971b). In other words, emotional imbalance is an unavoidable fact of life, and the human psyche requires that we release the pressure of our emotions just like opening the valve in a kettle, lest the “steam pressure exceeds the strength of the vessel” (Vygotsky, 1971a, para. 14). Through engagement with art, human emotions are discharged and regulated, and the psychological equilibrium is achieved again (Vygotsky, 1971a, 1971b). It is during the cathartic process that preexisting emotions are unveiled, processed, transformed, and regulated (Vygotsky, 1971b).

Catharsis and imagination

Critical to the cathartic process, emotional transformation requires engagement with imagination, which is regarded as “the central expression of an emotional reaction” (Vygotsky, 1971b, para. 22). The dialectical interactions between everyday emotion and artistic, or imaginary emotion is illustrated through Vygotsky’s idea of “doubleness of emotions” (Vygotsky, 1971b, para. 22). Emotions generated through art stem from everyday life, but they are discharged and changed as the result of people’s deep involvement in imagination (Vygotsky, 1971b). With the help of art, the abstract emotional energy from everyday life is given concrete forms as imaginary images or ideas, causing people to experience and release certain emotions as if they were authentic (Vygotsky, 1971b). Vygotsky referred to the emotions embodied and expressed through imagination as the “second expression” of emotions, which are transformed, generalized, and eventually developed into higher forms (Vygotsky, 1971b, para. 22). Therefore, imagination in art provides a unique opportunity for the discharge and transformation of emotions, which is otherwise unlikely to occur in our everyday life.

Drama in catharsis

When analyzing different forms of drama, Vygotsky drew our attention to the dramatic interactions in theater that lead to catharsis in the audience. Emotional contradictions arise as the protagonist faces and deals with a struggle, and the emotional tension is released and resolved as the struggle ends. Moreover, Vygotsky mentioned in a later work that through drama, consciousness is raised interpsychologically, as “in drama the feeling of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ is created” (Vygotsky, 1999, p. 243). Although he initially used drama to refer to human experience with art, later Vygotsky noticed that the influences of drama in art on the human psyche echoed the impacts of drama in everyday life on the development of personality (Smagorinsky, 2011). Consequently, drama was used to describe the conflicts between the person and the environment in everyday life, the resolution of which, as a catharsis, leads to the development of higher mental functions (Mok, 2017).

To summarize, the concept of catharsis as developed by Vygotsky opens up new possibilities for furthering our understanding of children’s emotional processes in play, where imagination and drama are inherent as they are in art. Unfortunately, Vygotsky did not develop this concept further beyond the Psychology of Art. However, he returned to the theme of emotions during the final stage of his life when he discussed the concept of perezhivanie to explore an individual’s emotional response to dramatic encounters with the social environment in life (Smagorinsky, 2011). Until now, catharsis in the Vygotskian sense remains largely underdeveloped. In most cases, it has been briefly mentioned without properly defined or theorized, and only a few efforts have been made to carry it further, for example, Smagorinsky (2011), Blunden (2016b), and Connery (2010). Collectively, these theoretical works identify catharsis as a potentially important concept, closely connected to the concept of perezhivanie.

The relations between the concept of catharsis and the concept of perezhivanie

Catharsis and perezhivanie as theoretical concepts existed during different phases of Vygotsky’s academic life. In the Psychology of Art, Vygotsky had already started formulating relations between the individual and the environment as refraction. He wrote in the chapter “Art and Life” that the social world, “in its own way refracts [emphasis added] and directs the stimuli acting upon the individual and guides all the reactions that emanate from the individual” (Vygotsky, 1971a, para. 23). This line of thought was developed in his later work, “The Problem of the Environment,” where he argued that not all objective characteristics of the environment determine the child’s development, but only the parts that are emotionally significant to the individual are processed and serve as the source of development (Vygotsky, 1994). Perezhivanie is thus theorized as “the prism [emphasis added] through which the influence of the environment on the child is refracted [emphasis added]” (Vygotsky, 1994, p. 341).

The refracting prism represents the child’s unity of intellectual understanding and intense emotional quality, particularly how the child perceives, interprets, and emotionally responds to a certain event (Vygotsky, 1994). Vygotsky gave an example, in which different children in the same family responded to the same event (their mother’s drinking problem and psychological disorders) very differently. This example illustrates well the notion of the refracting prism, whereby a child’s perezhivanie determines the nature of their relationship with the social situation through their emotional response and interpretation of the dramatic event, which in turn influences the next steps of their development (Fleer et al., 2017). However, analysis of the possible changes in the emotional quality of the child’s encounter with the event, the cathartic process, is necessary to better understand the principle of refraction.

Importantly, perezhivanie as a refracting prism represents the complex relational whole of the individual – with all their respective characteristics, experiences, and properties (Fleer, 2016). Because the purpose of this paper is to investigate the child’s process of emotional transformation in play, the unity of the person-environment and emotion-cognition is foregrounded in our discussions of perezhivanie as a theoretical concept. In particular, how emotions are released and transformed through person-environment interactions in play, and how this emotional shift affects ER development need to be theorized. With the concept of catharsis, the very process of emotional change can be made visible, which helps further reveal the nature of the dramatic refraction process. This will help us understand how exactly children reared in institutional settings emotionally relate and refract what is happening, and how this shapes the next step in their development.

Study design

The focus of this paper is how co-experiencing dramatic moments in play supports a child’s resolution of emotions and ER in the context of an orphanage in China. To answer the research question, a playworld was implemented in an orphanage in China for 10 weeks.

Research setting and participants

This study was conducted in a care unit of the Children’s Department within a Social Welfare Institute (SWI) in China. The unit was one of the few run by the SWI in collaboration with a local nongovernment organization (NGO). In China, an SWI functions as a comprehensive service provider and the last resort for children without parental care (Li & Bu, 2018). Given the negative impact of institutional rearing on child development as discussed in China (Liu & Zhu, 2009) and internationally (Julian et al., 2019), an increasing number of SWIs are adopting a variety of foster care models in addition to the traditional institutional care (Wang et al., 2017), including the SWI in the current study. As for the care unit under study, a collective institutional model of care (Li & Bu, 2018) was provided around the clock: the children shared a bedroom, followed the same schedule throughout the day, and had meals brought to them from the central canteen. In terms of education, while some were accepted into the school within the SWI, others had regular educational sessions and physiotherapy organized for them by the NGO. Unlike the typical practice of an SWI (Julian et al., 2019), children in this unit were varied in their biological ages and medical conditions. A total of 10 children and five adults from this unit were included in the data material.

Six staff members worked in this unit, including the educator who was also a researcher. This integrated role (Lewis, 2020) enabled a holistic understanding of the dynamics between the children and their social situation, both practically and theoretically. The project manager supervised all the units run by the NGO, and three caregivers and one physiotherapist cared for the children, documented their physical wellbeing, and kept the unit clean. Typically, caregivers work in shifts in SWIs in China (Li & Bu, 2018). However, in this unit, while the physiotherapist and one caregiver worked long shifts daily, the other two caregivers lived in the unit and had a bedroom next door to the children’s. All staff members took turns having their weekly one-day off.

Focus child

The focus child, Feifei (pseudonym), male, aged six years, eight months, was born with mild cerebral palsy, which caused slight mobility challenges in his right foot and led to his abandonment as an infant. Later, he was placed in one of the foster homes supervised by and located inside the SWI. At the start of our project, he was transferred to this unit because of constant and unresolved conflicts with his foster father, who had refused to have him in his home any longer. He was described as “defiant, angry, fussy, oppositional” by the foster parents, according to the orphanage staff. His case is presented in this paper because it helps illustrate the dialectics between the changes of social situation and the changes in an individual child. Specifically, it captures how the child transformed and was transformed by the social situation, which was also in transformation, as the playworld implementation proceeded.

Ethics

Because this study is concerned with children from disadvantaged situations, careful considerations are given to ethical issues. Ethics approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee of the authors’ university. The ethical guidelines in general and those specific to the current study, both postulated by the University, were strictly followed. Permission for data collection was granted by the director of the SWI, and written informed consent was obtained from the participating staff members and the SWI, the legal guardian of the child participants. The first-named author explained explicitly and in plain language to the SWI leadership and both adult and child participants that they had the right to withdraw with no consequence at any point of this study. Meanwhile, as an ongoing process, assent was sought not only through the initial explanations and consent seeking in a child-friendly manner but also through constant observation of non-verbal clues for discomfort and reluctance from the participants (Kirk, 2007). The choice to not participate by both adult and child participants was fully respected.

It was fully recognized that a power imbalance existed between the first-named author as educator-researcher and both child and adult participants, and that vulnerable children are more likely to perceive an adult as the authority and consequently more likely to please the researcher (Kirk, 2007). While the unevenness of power seems to be unavoidable, different actions were taken to minimize this imbalance (Dockett et al., 2012;). Examples include collecting the participants’ voices as data, including their ideas and preferences in the research design and process, empowering them through competence building, and collectively reflecting on the researchers’ roles and assumptions.

Playworld as an educational experiment

Consistently with the cultural-historical theory, Hedegaard (2008b) introduced the educational experiment as a synthesis of a planned pedagogical intervention and research method to investigate the potential impact of teaching activities on children’s learning and development. In this educational experiment, a playworld, originally designed by Lindqvist (1995) on the basis of Vygotsky’s theorization of drama and aesthetics, was implemented as an educational intervention for three main reasons. First, it features emotionally charged situations, which are intentionally created for children to imagine the emotional states of the roles in the story-based play plot (Marjanovic-Shane et al., 2011). Second, adults’ active participation as an inherent part of playworlds (Nilsson, 2010) create opportunities for participants to interact differently, hence transforms the social situation of the care unit (Authors, 2021). Third, it is flexible and adaptable, and has been implemented in different cultural contexts and for various educational purposes (Fleer, 2020). Although there has yet to be any playworld known to focus on ER, studies have suggest that playworlds support children’s emotional development (March & Fleer, 2016). The playworld in the current study is based on a well-known children’s story in China, My Little Bunnies. This story features an emotionally charged theme about three baby bunnies prevented a big gray wolf from entering their house and eating them while Mummy Bunny is away picking turnips.

The playworld sessions took place once a week, when the educator invited the children and staff members in the unit to participate. Every participant was able to choose a play role to enact and together they developed plots and co-experienced dramatic moments in play. The story and play plots were jointly decided by the adults and the children (Authors, 2021). Moreover, supplementary activities, such as book reading and imaginative play, were organized six days a week, according to the children’s competence and schedules.

Data collection

Digital video observation was the primary research method in this study, because it supports the examination of the developmental process and the dynamics the person and the social situation (Fleer, 2008). Data presented in this paper were collected using a GoPro and fieldnotes. The GoPro was fixed on the wall of the activity room within the unit as the only safe option for the children and the equipment. It allowed the first-named author to collect data as a researcher while fulfilling her role as an educator fully engaged in the everyday practice of teaching and learning. It helped capture the entirety of the social situation in that the interactions between the 10 participating children, including the focus child, the participating adults, and the educator-researcher were all collected and analyzed as data. For this paper, a total of 49 hours of video data was collected and analyzed, relevant to the focus child in the playworld.

Additionally, field notes as supplementary material documented the data-collecting researcher’s reflections, questions, and information beyond the permission for video recording.

Data analysis

Data relevant to the focus child and his interactions with his social surroundings in the emotionally charged situations in play and in real life were selected from the overall data set for analysis.

As shown in Figure 1, data organization mainly involved downloading videos into different folders and writing video logs. Afterwards, Hedegaard’s (2008c) three levels of analysis were applied. First, the common sense interpretation sought to provide an initial understanding of the focus child’s behavior and emotional expressions in relation to his social environment in each emotionally charged situation. Second, the situated practice interpretation focused on data-analysis across settings to identify patterns. Here, concepts of drama, imagination, catharsis, perezhivanie, doubleness of emotions, and inter- to intra-psychological functioning were used as analytical tools to understand the progressive change of Feifei’s role preferences and the way his emotions were expressed, lived through, and regulated over time. Third, the thematic interpretation linked the theoretical concepts, data, and research aims to answer the research question of this paper. New conceptual relations between the concepts of catharsis and perezhivanie were formed to better understand the child’s experience of emotions through the playworld and his ER development.

Figure 1. Data organization and analysis process.

Findings

The findings of this study highlight how the cathartic process in the playworld makes changes in ER visible. In our discussion of examples of this ER process in the context of a child’s perezhivanie, we first present an overall trend of how the child’s choices of play roles changed over time (see Figure 2). Then, three vignettes from the implementation and the post-experiment data are presented to capture the process of emotional changes through the dynamics between the child in transformation and the transforming social environment where Feifei, his emotions, and what he lived through form an inseparable part. Taken together, the data illustrate the cathartic process of emotional transformation as a key aspect of ER development supported through co-experiencing dramatic moments in playworld.

Figure 2. Feifei’s engagement with different play roles.

Figure 3. Feifei covering up baby bunnies with quilts.

Shifts of play role selections throughout the educational experiment

Figure 2 illustrates the overall trend of Feifei’s role engagement in play throughout the playworld, which was grouped into four periods according to his role preferences. Period 1 included the first three weeks, when he chose not to participate, but watched others play or staying alone. However, he already identified with the role of the big gray wolf by voicing his choice without hesitation during a discussion. Then, starting with Period 2, he became increasingly involved in the play as the wolf, which he played passionately and determinedly for three weeks, as illustrated in Vignette 2. This was followed by a short period (Period 3), when he remained active in the play, but without explicitly showing, physically or verbally, what role he was playing. The final period, Period 4, demonstrates a stark difference: he seemed to have lost interest in playing the wolf and found himself a new role as a caring daddy bunny. Figure 2 shows that in the playworld as a whole, Feifei engaged in different play roles with distinct emotional qualities. The shifts in role selection over time help shed light on the changes in Feifei’s emotions, which are explained further in the discussion section.

Vignette 1

Vignette 1 was collected during Week 1 of the implementation. The educator, two caregivers, and the children were preparing for their first playworld session, in which the bunny named Short Tail, enacted by the educator, was to celebrate her birthday. The children were very excited, because they had just had a birthday celebration a few days before. Feifei chose not to participate and stayed out of the activity room where the collective play took place.

A while later, the cheerful noise of the group drew Feifei back into the room. After watching others play for some time, he tried to draw the educator’s attention, but she was busy playing Short Tail and did not see him. So Feifei threw himself onto the floor, screaming, kicking, and waving his fists in the air, while looking at the educator from time to time.

The educator, sitting with the other children, pointed to Feifei and said, “Look, the kid over there looks upset. Let’s invite him to our birthday party!” The boy acting as a wolf nodded and said, “Ok! I am Big Grey Wolf” he shouted as he crawled to Feifei’s side. Feifei screamed and tried to run away, and the wolf caught up and clapped him on the back. Feifei became really angry, frowning and hitting him back really hard with both hands. “No hitting others!” he yelled as he was striking the wolf repeatedly. The educator went to check on him while having a conversation with another child as two bunnies. Feifei, who had rolled away from the group, was lying on the floor, and kept kicking and screaming, while looking at the educator. Then he sat up and shouted, “BigGrayWolf!” Before the wolf reached for him, Feifei threw himself onto the floor again and started screaming. The wolf went back to singing “Happy Birthday” with the others, and Feifei’s scream became sharper and louder. As the others were “blowing out candles,” he rolled around and gave out piercing screams. A caregiver went to check on him and see whether he wanted to join in the play. He rolled further away and said, “No!”

Then he stood up and went to the wolf, pressed him hard on the shoulders, and kicked him on the back. The wolf groaned but did not fight back. The educator went over to check and comfort the wolf boy. Feifei screamed, and then he snorted and left the room.

This vignette shows a typical everyday moment of drama for Feifei in which he expressed his dissatisfaction and anger through screaming, rolling on the floor, physical aggressions, and anticipating others’ reactions. His raw emotions were expressed impulsively and fiercely, leaving little space for reflection. Although it is not known what exactly he experienced before moving into this unit, it was clear that his behavioral pattern was historically constructed as he interacted with his environment. At the beginning of the playworld implementation, the others still met with Feifei’s pattern of behavior the way they did outside play. For example, the educator directed her attention to the hurt child first rather than to Feifei.

Vignette 2

Vignette 2 demonstrates how Feifei typically behaved during Period 2, in which he devoted himself to the role of the big gray wolf and acted fiercely and aggressively in the playworld. Over these three weeks, Feifei’s emotional expression gradually intensified and eventually peaked in play as the wolf. Through participating in the emotionally charged situations in the playworld, he expressed and shared his anger through his voices and actions of a wolf, which facilitated the processing and transformation of his emotions through dynamic interactions with others in play.

This playworld episode happened on an afternoon during Week 4 of the implementation. All the participating adults and children were inside an imaginary situation in which the big gray wolves wanted to catch the bunnies.

As soon as it began, Feifei stood straight, his hands in the air and his fingers spread wide open toward the children before him, “[I am] BigGrayWolf! I am going to eat you up!” He claimed with a determined voice and started running around catching bunnies.

“Let’s go! Quickly!” Mummy Bunny helped a baby bunny stand up to escape from the wolves. Feifei went to grab the baby bunny by the hand, which made her cry. Seeing that the mummy bunny was protecting her baby, Feifei went over with another wolf, and he pushed Mummy Bunny hard onto the padded floor. Mummy Bunny screamed angrily, struggling to stand up. The educator stopped him, “Feifei! Feifei!” Feifei walked away, marching with exaggerated strides to the mirror, and looked at himself as he howled. He said loudly to himself, “I am not listening!”

After a little while, Feifei returned to the play. “I must catch all of the bunnies!” He exclaimed loudly, kneeling on the floor, claws extended. Again and again, he raised his claws at the bunnies. “[I am] BigGrayWolf! Charge!” he shouted toward the bunny acted by a caregiver, claws in the air, “Let me eliminate you first!” He went to push her. Then he turned to another wolf and declared, “[I am] BigGrayWolf! I will eat all of the bunnies!”

Then he charged at a bunny acted by another caregiver. Mummy Bunny tried to pull him away, and both of them fell onto the floor. He turned and bit Mummy Bunny on her ankle.

“No biting! No biting!” said the caregivers loudly.

“We are just pretending. Don’t give real bites!” The educator told Feifei. He smiled, stood up, and raised his claws again at another bunny, and then another. Every now and then, he went to the mirror to adjust his wolf headband, and returned to the play as a fierce wolf, charging, pushing, and even scratching the bunnies.

This vignette reveals that the previous raw emotion of anger, as described in Vignette 1, was processed and culturally expressed in the imaginary situation through the role of the wolf. The previously hidden emotions could now be expressed with imaginative actions, such as extended claws, words through gritted teeth, loud voices of yelling and howling, and they were met with emotional responses from the other players and shared interpsychologically. The shared emotionally charged situations in the playworld changed the dynamics between Feifei and the others. The dramatic interactions in play also created conditions for his emotions to be made visible and reflected through the play role.

Vignette 3

Data in Vignette 3 were collected during one of the post-experiment visits. By this time, Feifei had not played the wolf for several weeks, but consistently preferred to play the role of the daddy bunny and the play plot of “Bedtime for Bunnies,” in which he watched baby bunnies as they slept and kept the big gray wolf from entering the house.

This very short vignette happened during the children’s free playtime, and Feifei was observed to be placing some stuffed animals onto one of the shelves, and covering them up with sensory integration equipment (see figure 3). When asked what he was doing, he replied, “I am Daddy Bunny. I am covering up my baby bunnies with quilts!”

Discussion

In this paper we argue that catharsis as processing and transformation of emotions is a crucial aspect of ER that drives the reorganization of the person-environment unity. In a playworld, catharsis takes the form of a triadic relationship between emotions, imagination, and dramatic interactions. As the child engages in the playworld, the cathartic process helps readjust the way the child emotionally interacts with the environment, brings new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving for the child, and thus changes the child’s living as a whole. In the case of Feifei, we can see that his relations with the surrounding world changed as his anger and frustration were repeatedly discharged through the role of the wolf during Period 2 (see Figure 2). Over time, his play motive changed as his choice of roles and plots shifted to ones with a completely different emotional quality. This is consistent with studies that have reported that children are motivated to use play for the release of unresolved emotional tension acquired from emotionally stressful life events (Vadeboncoeur & Collie, 2013). Further, in the current study, we found that the release and working over of emotions through the playworld leads children to a completely different intellectual understanding of and relationship with the social environment, transforming both what is emotionally important to them and how it is refracted through their perezhivanie. This renewed unity of affect and intellect leads to changes in the children’s selection of emotionally significant events, which in turn shapes how they perceive and interact with the social environment.

Moreover, emotionally charged dramatic situations in a playworld serve as the impetus for change in the cathartic process and ER. Drama as the key factor of cultural development, in which its resolution qualitatively changes a child’s relations with the social environment (Vygotsky, 1997). While the resolution of drama retains children’s motive for further development through reorganized social relations and renewed competence, failure to resolve a drama may cause them to stay fixated with the same social relations and interaction styles (Hedegaard, 2008a). In the example of Feifei, the reported conflicts between him and his foster father caused him to use the same ER and interaction patterns with the others even though he was in a different environment. Under these circumstances, play with intentionally embedded drama provided an alternative to his resolution of previous drama, reshapes his relations with his social environment, and thus become the source of changes in his ER. Emotionally charged dramatic situations in play allow children to express their emotions, reveal unresolved issues, and reflect on their experiences (Fein, 1989), in other words, experience catharsis. A playworld with drama embedded in it “creates a condensed and amplified experience for children” (Fleer et al., 2020, p. 57), in which ample opportunities are available for the resolution of drama and transformation of emotions. Moreover, for play to matter to development, the drama has to be emotionally significant to the child (Blunden, 2016a) and the intensity of the dramatic events need to be aligned with the psychological structure of the child (El’koninova, 2001). In this study, the drama introduced in the playworld corresponded with Feifei’s struggles with anger, and offered opportunities for catharsis and for the child’s different interpretation of social relations in play. This is particularly important for children reared in institutional care settings, where the social situation does not necessarily support the children’s ER development (McCall, 2013).

From the shared imaginary space in a playworld, drama is experienced repeatedly through catharsis, and children begin regulating their own emotions. First, imagination enables the forceful and hidden emotional energy inside them to emerge (Vygotsky, 1971b). Despite the fact that the play was imaginary by nature, the emotions expressed were real (Vygotsky, 1971b). In play, preexisting emotions are manifested through roles and plots in the imaginary situation, as the emotions seek corresponding representations and embodiments. Using the play role as a pivot, the private and unknown emotions are revealed, detached from the self and relived in play (Ferholt & Nilsson, 2016). In the example case of Feifei, the inherent characteristics and emotional quality of the play role provided a concrete form and channel for him to release his emotional energy that had not been acknowledged or processed in the past.

Second, imagination allows for the “double expression of emotions” (Vygotsky, 1971b, para. 22), which creates motivating conditions for the child to stay engaged with the emotionally charged dramatic events in play. The more Feifei expressed anger and frustration through being the wolf, the more joyful he was, because he was motivated and determined to play the wolf even when everyone else around him was exploring something novel and mysterious. This emotional contradiction continued building up as the play plot repeated over the weeks, eventually reaching its peak and terminating at the same time. As Vygotsky postulated, “whenever an emotion finds its solution in images of fantasy, this ‘dreaming’ weakens the true manifestation of the emotion” (Vygotsky, 1971b, para. 22). Over time, as Feifei’s emotional discharge through the role of the wolf was resolved, he was able to form new relations with the others, not as a fierce wolf against his prey, but as a loving daddy bunny protecting his babies.

Apart from the intense discharge of previously hidden emotions, renewed emotional awareness was supported through co-experiencing of the cathartic process. Play requires that the child be consciously aware and display the emotional quality consistent with the role and theme, and share it interpsychologically among fellow players which, with repetition overtime, becomes conscious feeling states on an intrapsychological level (Zaporozhets, 2002). An implication is that in the shared imaginary situation, the child needs to constantly regulate the others while being regulated by other players, and this precedes self-regulation (Bodrova & Leong, 1998). As Feifei acted out his emotions through the actions of the wolf, the others reacted to his behavior with screams, complaints, fighting back, and even tears. Not only were his raw emotions made visible to others, but his emotional expressions were reflected back to him from others through their reactions, demanding him to be mindful and adjust his play actions in order for play to continue. As noted by Kravtsov and Kravtsova (2010), the child ought to be simultaneously inside play as a participant and outside play as an observer, which enables the possibility for emotional self-awareness and regulation. As Holodynski and Friedlmeier (2010) pointed out, emotional expressions serve as signs to communicate and regulate how one interacts with both the others and with the self. This dynamic interaction creates conditions for children to gain a better intellectual understanding of the emotions that they feel. Therefore, in alignment with Fleer (2020), emotion and cognition are unified through the child’s participation in the imaginary situation in play, which, according to Vygotsky, is a crucial developmental achievement (Bodrova & Leong, 2003). For Feifei, the role of the wolf ceased to be emotionally significant, and what he could emotionally relate to then became the caring and protective daddy bunny.

Conclusion

The current study sought to contribute empirically and theoretically by showing how co-experiencing of emotionally charged dramatic events in play supports the resolution, transformation, and regulation of emotions in a child. By adopting the cultural-historical concepts of perezhivanie and catharsis, we found that qualitative changes take place in the child as emotionally significant events in play are refracted through the child’s perezhivanie. More specifically, co-experiencing of the shared imaginary situations in the playworld transforms the social situation of the institutional care setting, which creates new possibilities for the child to process and work through their emotions in a more informed way. This not only leads to emotional transformation and regulation in the child, allowing the child to develop new ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and living as a whole, but also reorganizes the child-environment unity. Feifei seems to have found resolution and safety in the new connections he created through the process he experienced with the others through the playworld. Thus it is difficult to separate his emotions from his living through the playworld contexts as a total situation.

In this study, catharsis is recognized as an important aspect of ER development, encompassing transformation and resolution of emotions through co-experiencing of emotionally charged dramatic events with others in play. The transformation of the social situation through the playworld implementation and the transformation of the child’s emotions and experiences are dialectically related, which transforms the child’s relations with the social environment and brings new developmental possibilities. This paper takes a step further from the previous playworld literature and highlights that emotions are part of the whole catharsis and perezhivanie experienced which involves the development of new ways of thinking, feeling, knowing, behaving, and living as a whole. This theoretical understanding contributes to the knowledge about children’s experience as a whole and that of emotions in play in an orphanage context as well as providing a cultural device to support their ER development.

A limitation of this study is that because of the predetermined time frame, the educational experiment was limited to 10 weeks. While some qualitative changes are visible in Feifei’s behavior during play, a longer period would allow for observations of further changes in Feifei’s ER during both the playworld and his everyday interactions with others. Additionally, given the word limit and capacity of a journal paper, only one child was featured in the empirical data. Further research on children’s catharsis in collective play is needed.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the participating children and staff members, and to the orphan-care organisation where this study was conducted.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.