Emotional development in the educational preschool programs of Soviet and Post-Soviet Times

ABSTRACT

Emotions are a sensitive theme in all languages, and researchers seek to understand and describe them cross-linguistically and according to the national traditions. The ‘emotional turn’ in the human sciences has touched on the educational sphere in an interesting way, where the traditional Soviet-Russian approach was replaced by the westernized terms of emotional intelligence. While applying these international schemes to the Russian psycholinguistic reality, scholars failed to do so in a consistent way. This study reviews the former and current approaches to emotional education in Russia and provides examples of the application of the authors’ attitudes to Russian-language material. Although some psychologists speak to children in a natural and suitable way, others just translate from English, which often seems inapplicable. Modern bookshops and websites abound with advice and prompts on how to develop the emotional sphere of personal life. The universal approach to emotional upbringing may ignore local language-specific traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-primary/preschool education
• Soviet Union/Russia
• Vygotsky
• western/Russian education
• emotional development

Children and emotions

Emotions are considered to be an integral part of human social and communicative development. The genesis of the social emotions takes place in early childhood, through relationships with peers and adults. During this period, children are sensitive to the functional need to saturate feelings, which is transformed into a desire to share experiences of their own relationships to various objects and of the phenomena of reality and becomes an important factor determining the direction of their personality. This natural need brings awareness of one’s own emotional state; recognition of the emotions of other people while ‘reading’ situational and expressive signals and having empathy towards them; knowledge of terms connected to feelings and their use; and the ability to differentiate internal and external, positive, and negative emotions, to cope with them and to express them in communicative behavior (Karelina, 2017). Classic Russian school of psychology (as represented by the work of Sergey L. Rubinstein and Pavel M. Jacobson) asserted that emotion is a specific form of the human attitude towards the objects and phenomena of reality, arising as a reflection of reality due to its correspondence or inconsistency with human needs and is a form of a person’s active relationship with the world (Karelina, 2017).

When the child grows up, his/her emotions become more elaborated, detailed, their contents increase and interweave with psychic processes. Feelings may be classified into moral, aesthetic, practical, and intellectual, and the enlarging experience regulates the empathetic expression in words, intonations, eye movements, gestures, and deeds. Some emotions are superficial, some are deep, they do not always correspond to feelings, and with children, they may easily change their scale (Il’in, 2001).

According to the Dalai Lama in his interview for TIME (Campbell, 2019),

Western civilization, including America, is very much oriented toward materialistic life. But that culture generates too much stress, anxiety, and jealousy, all these things. So my No. 1 commitment is to try to promote awareness of our inner values.

From kindergarten onward, critiques the Dalai Lama the neglect of emotions, children should be taught about ‘taking care of emotion’:

Whether religious or not, as a human being we should learn more about our system of emotion so that we can tackle destructive emotion, in order to become more calm, have more inner peace.

He supports the Atlas of Emotions (atlasofemotions.org), which aims to help people understand the triggers and stages of feeling and thus the essence of our affective life. It is available in five languages; the English version is based on the concepts of anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment.

Many researchers claim that from primarily primitive ones, emotions evolve into secondary complex and tertiary socially constructed emotions; their classification includes scales and oppositions, and spontaneous and rational elements. Darwin enumerated six emotions, while TenHouten (2007) enumerated a total of 46. Johnson-Laird and Oatley (1989) analyzed 590 emotion words and elicited five basic ones: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The WordNet-Affect Lexicon¹ initially included six traditional labels for emotions that were classified into positive (joy, surprise) and negative (anger, disgust, fear, sadness) emotions. Today, the WordNet-Affect Lexicon is a collection of emotion-related words from various parts of speech grouped into the classes of positive, negative, neutral, and ambiguous and categorized into 28 subcategories (joy, love, fear, etc.); moreover, one term can appear in multiple categories. Sentiment and emotional analysis² targets the marketers while measuring feelings and moods of people who are offered products and texts in different cultures and groups.

Certain types of higher mental functions, such as deliberate attention, logical memory, verbal and conceptual thought and complex emotions, could not emerge and take form in the development process without the constructive assistance of social interaction (Ivic, 1989). Scholars study development of emotions with children in different situations. Programs like RULER (rulerapproach.org) start by shaping the practices of adults and later transferring the knowledge that all the scope of emotions is allowed and important.

The convergence of different theories can be seen, e.g. in the work by Ericsson and Sand (2018) who contribute to methods of identification of emotions through a collectively shared emotion system for preschool children. The review article by Kislova and Rusalova (2013) takes into account western psychological concepts (e.g. emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and recognize personal emotions and those of other people, cf. Mayer & Salovey, 1997). It traces these concepts as they appear in speech and physiological data. Denham et al. (2002) proposed a research-based classification of developmental needs in the domain of socially mediated emotions. Parkinson (2011) stated that interpersonal and group methods as well as social assessments of emotions should be integrated in order to give comprehensive picture. Zhikhareva and Seytmambetova (2019) hypothesized that not only do different psychological schools present emotions as their subject, but also other scientific disciplines try to find integrated approaches to their study of emotions.

Comparison of theories of childhood emotions

Soviet studies of emotional development mainly followed the ideas of Vygotsky who argued that generalizations are formed because of nature of the verbal communication (e.g. Campo, 2013; Davidson et al., 2014; Reis Mesquita, 2012; Tarabakina, 2016; Vygotskij, 1984, 1991). Leontiev (1959) insisted that the child is the source of his/her own development. Without the activity of the child, the efforts of the adult remain meaningless. Each developmental stage corresponds to a certain type of leading activity: emotional interaction in infancy, instrumental activity in toddlerhood, play at preschool age, learning activity at school age, interpersonal interaction in early adolescence, and occupational training in late adolescence. At each stage, corresponding emotions accompany human life.

Zaporozhec (1986) proved that the development of generalizations is based on a subject’s actions rather than on verbal communication. The educational system for preschoolers should be based on the idea of amplification of child development: creating opportunities for a preschooler to engage in a variety of age-appropriate activities fostering development, such as play, drawing, constructional play (called ‘construction’ in the Russian tradition), listening to fairytales, doing simple chores (called ‘labor’ in the Russian tradition), interactions with adults and peers, etc. The development of emotions is a process of gradual mastery of the assessment of activities having a meaning in a certain situation. Emotions have signaling and regulatory functions. Bozhovich (1968) showed that human needs and emotions are complex phenomena that emerge late in development and are also mediated by culture. Through engaging in leading activities, a child develops a wide range of capabilities, including emotional connection with others, motivation to engage in more complex social activities, the creation of new cognitive abilities, and the restructuring of old ones (Bodrova & Leong, 2007, p. 98). Lisina (1986) claimed that adults teach children throughout the entire period of preschool childhood; emotions belong to the socially determined sphere, and they emerge, and are rejected or affirmed in the company of other people. Therefore, in the cultural-historical approach, emotions are socially conditioned. This means that in the ontogenesis, children first communicate about their own emotional state to secure the compassion of adults and their support; later, children seek emotional support while acting. After that, they start communicating their feelings of sympathy and affection; then, they convey intimate signs related to their life interests and personality. Thereafter, they start to be interested in adults’ identities, and finally, children track adults’ attitudes and emotional reactions as etalons of behavior. Adults’ standards become models for children’s expressions of affectivity through verbalization. Right and wrong assessments may give an adequate or erroneous picture of the world. The surroundings of children may enhance or forbid certain modes and manners of self-expression.

This approach developed by Soviet psychology and pedagogy still dominates in the official documents regarding early childhood education in Russia. Feelings are viewed as appropriate or inappropriate, good or bad, and bad feelings should be condemned and eliminated. The necessity to suppress some emotions is still a strong cultural tradition. Often, moral stories are read and discussed in order to impose polar ‘black-or-white’ assessment of protagonists’ behavior. The main target were feelings of somebody else, not of the child her/himself. Some emotions were almost forbidden, other were enhanced. Of course, teachers showed a lot of empathy, compassion, and responsiveness in various circumstances, for example, while reading books, and different emotions were expressed and maintained in interaction with preschoolers.

In the western psychological tradition, emotions are considered as a part of cognitive and intellectual development. In practice, it means that children should be able to recognize and name emotions in themselves, identify them in other people, understand their reasons and consequences, learn how to handle them, how to regulate feelings and their inner and outer representation, show empathy, and establish and maintain relationships. The promotion of social and emotional development is an integral or separate component of pre-primary programs where children are trained how to handle emotions. Educators use terms such as emotional intelligence (translated as intellect in Russian), emotional connection, emotional growth, and emotional skills. They help children become aware of their emotions through the use of books, dolls, artistic activities, fairytales, and role play. Special stories (using puppets and books) are invented to show children how to detect and articulate their own feelings, how to deal with depressing and damaging circumstances, and how not to negate feelings, but to overcome them. As other stimuli (e.g. emoticons, objects, animals, children, and adults) demonstrate markers of one’s emotional state, children are taught to read and name them and subsequently remember what kind of emotion this might be, how it should be experienced and discussed and what should be done in each case. The constructionist approach in pedagogy dictates building upon evident symptoms and implementing one of familiar scenarios. Children should not be ashamed of their natural feelings whatever they are; they should be able to express them without feeling rejected or humiliated. Evidently, this is a result of a hundred years of psychoanalysis. Children are encouraged to try to solve problems together with adults, to try to understand them and to act accordingly. On the one hand, some of the most influential American psychologists are in fact of Soviet/Russian origin, and transnational scholarly communities try to use the same terms. On the other hand, the term social is understood differently in Soviet and western theories, as collective relations and personal attitudes in the Soviet context and as individual relations and norms of the group in the western context. Emotions have an object, whereas moods have none. Some emotions last for a long time and include several episodes, others are short and simple (Prihid’ko, 2009) (Table 1).

Table 1. Comparison of Vygotsky’s and western theories (following Obukhova, 2012).

	In western theories	In Vygotsky’s theory
The subject of investigation	motivation, intellect, behavior	the psychology of consciousness
The course of development	socialization, i.e. the transition from a biological being to a social one	individualization of mental functions, a process of transition from social to individual mental life
The conditions of development	heredity and the environment	the morpho-physiological features of the brain and communication
The source of development	inside the individual, within his nature	outside of the individual, in culture/society
The form of development	development is an adaptation to the environment	development takes place through the acquisition of historically created forms and modes of activity
The causes of mental development	convergence of two factors: heredity and the environment	learning and education, i.e. learning with the help of adults or other children

Emotional education in the Russian tradition

The Russian psychological theory of the birth and development of emotions was a separate part of the so-called all-round education in Soviet preschool programs. The main framework was created by Zaporozhec, Vygotsky’s pupil, followed by Neverovich and Kosheleva (Kosheleva, 1985; Zaporozhec & Neverovich, 1986). The main idea behind the programs was that human emotions serve as mediators of social values through standards of expression during communication with caretakers. Thus, normative behavior is the goal of the child’s emotional life during joint/shared activity. This historical perspective, sociocultural approach and internal psychological mechanism of interrelations arose from Vygotsky’s legacy that feelings are the nucleus of the person, an organ of his individuality. The core aim was teaching emotional regulation, control of feelings, and the enrichment of their content. The highest possible class of feeling included moral, aesthetic and knowledgeable/informative feelings. Compassion, empathy, care, duty, mutual help and responsiveness belonged to this class. All activities and communication with adults and peers helped to elaborate emotions and feelings.

According to Zaporozhec (in Kosheleva, 1985, pp. 8–28), a child is born neither evil nor good, neither moral nor immoral. His moral qualities develop primarily as a result of the attitude of others to him, and how they educate him. Overindulgence is a mistake (when parents do not teach the child to perform necessary duties and thus unwittingly raise an egoist who appears consumerist to others). Rough treatment, shouting and unfair punishments damage the child’s personality, cause a negative attitude to adults’ demands, and create a psychological barrier between the adult and the child. Correct ideas about the moral character of the Soviet person, about his³ attitude to other people, to himself, to his work and civil duties should be instilled in the child. At the same time, he must have an understanding of what is good and what is bad; why some actions are disapproved of and others are worthy of approval. It is necessary that the child’s moral ideas become the driving motives of his behavior and that he has not only an understanding of, but also a positive emotional attitude toward his moral obligations. The physical raising of a child must be linked with mental, moral and aesthetic aspects and labor education.⁴ The emotional development of a preschooler as supported by adults is one of the essential conditions that ensure the effectiveness of the learning and upbringing process in its various aspects, as well as the nature of the child’s attitude to people and to the surrounding environment. The formation of higher human feelings occurs in the process of assimilating social values, social requirements, norms and ideals, which under certain conditions become internal properties of the child’s personality, the content of the motivation for his behavior. As a result of this assimilation, the child acquires a kind of system of standards or values: he evaluates different phenomena emotionally as attractive or repulsive, as good or evil, as beautiful or ugly. Thus, he feels the need to comply with certain rules and regulations to achieve important and interesting goals, and he assesses his teachers’ behavior. Also essential is the activity of imagination that allows the child to emotionally anticipate the long-term consequences of certain actions. The essential difference between emotions and organic sensations is their connection with the objective world, and emotions have a specific influence on the actualization of behavior motives. The intellectual pleasure that a child receives when acquiring new knowledge may, if the educational process is properly organized, be richer and more exciting than the anxiety about getting or not getting a good mark, the achievement of which was previously the main motivation of his activities. The satisfaction of doing something useful for others, the child’s growing sense of self-esteem which allows him to experience the possibility of performing more important, more responsible duties, can affect the child’s personality more deeply than the fear of punishment or the pleasure of receiving praise.

Ezhkova (2008) argued that the successful organization of the educational process in preschool institutions is impossible without the orientation of teachers on the age-related values of children. Pedagogical influence on the emotional sphere of preschoolers should be consistent, systematic and carried out throughout preschool. The basis for the implementation of the emotional component in education, including its content, methods, tools, and the pedagogical conditions for its successful implementation in the educational process of preschool institutions consists of the following: orientation to the psychophysical unity of the child’s body as an integrated system; consistent changes in the forms of emotional response in preschool childhood (emotional attitude in the form of brief emotional reactions, emotional differentiation, identification and emotional isolation), taking into account the regularity of changes in the emotional sphere in preschool age children due to the socialization of the content of emotional manifestations (situational variability of emotional response, social transformation of emotional expression, verbal designation of emotions, etc.); and the need to refer to the personal experience of children, which comes in a variety of individual manifestations. The emotional component takes a leading place in artistic and creative activities and games. In other groups of activities (in which intellectual-cognitive and active-practical components dominate), it is present only in the procedural part, providing emotional acceptance of educational material by children, comprehension of the content through the influence of emotions, and awakening personal attitudes to objects of knowledge. The following conditions must be observed: unity and interrelation of proper emotional and mediated emotional development of preschool children, the emotional nature of communication between teachers and children, care for the emotional wellbeing of children; maintaining a balance between activities regulated by the teacher and free independent activities of the children.

Emotions can be attributed to ethical (Timokhin & Paramonova-Vavakina, 2010) and aesthetic (Tomilina, 2012) education. Veraksa et al. (2019) investigated preschool children (aged 5–6 years) in order to explore the relationship between understanding emotions and their pragmatic functions and discovered that in tests, telling and retelling stories using a picture series, this connection could be revealed in semantic and narrative completeness, adequacy, and in the understanding of the characters’ actions. Studies of child language development demonstrate that in Russian-language acquisition, emotion forms part of the elocutionary aspect, uses metaphors, is linked to expression as well as implicit and explicit assessment (Abakumova, 2010; Dobrya, 2013). Ovseytseva (2014) tried to determine the order of the appearance of the basic emotional words in Russian-speaking children. A low threshold of reaction and a medium level of empathy determines higher status in the group (Rjabonedelja, 1997). In children’s diagnostics, emotions are often connected to colors (e.g. Tkach & Kurdyukova, 2019). Research by Cekaite and Ekström (2019) shows that teachers respond to negative emotions like anger, irritation, and distress expressed by children through the application of social norms. Positive pedagogy claims that the ability to be happy and to have other positive emotions determines educational success. There are also studies on the expression of emotions in children’s literature and cross-linguistic studies of children’s language.

New trends in Russian emotional education

The main western trends – self-reflection and awareness of one’s own emotional state – were, until recently, absolutely alien. More recently, new methods have made their entrance into Russian preschool institutions. There are private and public areas of feeling. It is doubtful whether we can teach someone how to recognize what they are feeling in terms of emotional repertoire. The number of emotions in all available programs is nowadays limited (starting from two of them); when borrowed and adopted from another language, names for emotions really denote something absent from the Russian culture and mindset. The five or seven main emotions may not coincide with traditional Russian categories (cf. Introduction to this special issue). It is easy to imagine that when children become familiar with them from an early age, the mindset of the Russian-speaking population will change.

During the years spent in preschool education, the child learns to generalize about various concepts, which eventually lead to change in the structure of consciousness. The traditional set of Russian emotions has many terms. The fairytales show what was taught as typical behavior for heroes during their adventures. While reading children’s literature, adults try to regulate children’s emotional education through blame and praise and through the binary opposition of horoshij/plohoj and dobryj/zloj (nuances of good vs. bad). The notion of zhalko (feeling sorry for someone) was one of the general explanations of the attitude towards the surrounding world for pre-primary children, whereas sovest’ (conscience) was more common in the discussions with the primary school students. Empathy as a term did not exist; instead, sochuvstvie (co-feeling) was highly frequent, denoting trying to arrive at the same state of mind as another person. Researchers claim that other emotions like obida, toska, pechal’ are typical only of the Russian people. Rakhilina and Reznikova (2013, p. 25) write:

The mapping of one [semantic] domain to another, in which there is a one-to-one (or close to it) correspondence between the source and the result of a metaphor—a property of abstract concepts that are inaccessible to perception; emotions that do not have ‘independent’ concepts often behave this way. Their frames are always modeled based on simpler, physiological states, quite accurately “copying” the corresponding linguistic context and behavior of the original word. [translation is mine – EP]

Mezhdunarodnaja set’ razvitija emocional’nogo intellekta ‘EI deti’ (International network of emotional intelligence development @KTKEIkids) ei-kids.com for children aged 4–15 and their parents present emotions as a superpower, and state that if children learn how to handle them, they can help to solve any problem. The program was implemented by scholars from Yale University in cooperation with their colleagues from the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. These children know that no emotion is bad and can utilize and regulate their emotional states and feelings.

There are websites that popularize the theory of emotions by Robert Plutchik (4brain.ru/blog/emotion-theory-of-robert-plutchik, psychojournal.ru/article/145-adaptacionnaya-teoriya-emociy-roberta-plutchika.html). Sites like those described in (Kudrjavceva & Martinkova, 2017) introduce emotional regulation and reflection into the curriculum with the help of emoticons and other tools that monitor pupils’ mood.

The popular psychologist Petranovskaja (Mendeleeva, 2015) argues that emotions were not allowed in the Soviet Union, that people had to suffer and repress their feelings heroically, and such attitudes are still relevant in contemporary Russia. She lectures a lot about emotional intelligence⁵ and publishes practical guides for parents and children, which help them to understand their internal life and to verbalize what is going on (e.g. Petranovskaja, 2013, 2017). One of the most senior child psychologists, Gippenrejter (2003), has also joined those academics who speak about emotional intelligence.

Ul’eva issued a series ‘Skazki pro emocii’ [Fairytales about emotions] published by Klever which included the following: Pochemu ja zljus’? Pochemu ja obidelsja? Pochemu mne strashno? Pochemu mne grustno? Pochemu mne stydno? Pochemu ja zaviduju? (‘Why am I angry? Offensed? Afraid? Sad? Ashamed? Jealous?’). Another series by K. Spilman was translated into Russian: Poleznye skazki [Useful fairytales] (St. Petersburg: Piter). Kogda ja bojus’ [When I am afraid], Kogda ja zljus’ [When I am angry], Kogda ja verju v sebja [When I believe in myself] etc. There are also other publications on emotional development of children, for example, by Andreenko and Alekinova (2014), Pashkevich (2015), Shimanskaja and Shimanskij (2017), Kes (2020) and Byelorussian Zhigalko (2011).

Some internet bloggers who write about their own children have developed into writers presenting current westernized approaches to family education, like Bykova (2018) who dedicated her book to the ‘friendship between children and emotions’. Using concepts from theories of emotional intelligence, she discusses different problems within the family context and speaks about six basic emotions (strakh, gnev, otvrashchenie, pechal’, radost’, interes; although on page 27 she adds udivlenie without discussion) and classifies 35 affective states based on their direction, meaning, nuances and intensity. In fact, she also speaks about typical Russian emotional states, but it seems unnatural when she says that children should be given examples of ispytavaet otvrashchenie [experiences repulsion] and not of protivno [disgusting].

Gottman and DeClaire’s book ‘Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child’ from 1997 was published in Russian in 2015. A British program called Skylab Learning is distributed by the publishing house Umnica (umnitsa.ru). The book by Lembi (2016) translated from English is included in the package. It introduces the widespread western tradition of teaching emotions to small children by recognizing, identifying, understanding and naming them, being aware of their own and others’ emotions and trying to establish trusting relationships, which support learning and health. Five emotions are introduced: strah, ljubov’, grust’, radost’, and gnev, all of different complexity, introducing not easy grammatical structures. They are made into small toys of different colors that should be placed into a transparent pocket on the belly of a plush rabbit when the animal feels the corresponding emotions. This also may be considered as a negative example of simplifying the task of forming emotions, reducing all diversity to a few cliches. The choice of words is odd for 0–3-year-olds, as is the grammatical form (adverbs corresponding to states would be more suitable than nouns). Moreover, the English rabbit is alien in Russian culture, a hare (with a lot of diminutive forms) would be more appropriate. However, children like to play games which have to do with emotions and are fond of the toys provided. This company collaborates with Larisa Surkova (surkovainfo.ru), a mother of five who has written numerous books about child upbringing, including emotions, e.g. stories for children representing a combination of typical Russian and typical western educational plots (Surkova, 2017, 2019). Kedrova (2015) considers at least 10 emotions: vina, styd, otvrashchenie, obida, zlost’/gnev, strakh, revnost’, zavist’, radost’ and razocharovanie.

Hasbro (2016, Delmont) produced a Play-Doh set for the Russian-speaking market to study emotions presenting four of them in different grammatical forms, three adjectives (grustnyj, schastlivyj, ispugannyj – although nouns would suit better because here we have only the masculine form) and one noun (sjurpiz) that does not correspond to any basic emotional word in Russian and introduces directly the English word for udivlenie.

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow (jewish-museum.ru) uses seven emotional stickers in their pedagogical activities (interes, otvrashchenie, radost’, strah, grust’, udivlenie and zlost’). Museums of Emotions in Moscow and St. Petersburg (museumofemotions.ru) offer a visit to a labyrinth of seven rooms, each one dedicated to a particular emotion (gnev, udivlenie, otvrashhenie, vljublennost’, strakh, radost’ and vdokhnovenie), and everybody must visit all of them in order to come out.

All in all, we see that the introduction of emotional words into pre-primary education has shifted focus on the way of teaching from collective to individual, from prescription to consciousness, from expression to recognition, from a continuum of emotionality to a number of emotions, from cognitive development to emotional intelligence. Some of emotions are rooted in Russian culture, others are English-based while others are at least partially Chinese-based because most of the toys with facial expressions are produced in China. In both approaches, emotions are regulated and social, yet the social is understood as group-oriented in the Russian/Soviet approach and as person-oriented in the western approach.

Conclusion

Historians, ethnographers, sociologists and anthropologists have all discovered in their turn that emotions are not understood and treated in the same way in different societies, historical periods, social classes, groups, etc. (e.g. Mikhailova, 2016; Plamper, 2012; Reddy, 2001; Zorin, 2016). In the history of pedagogy, an analogous phenomenon has taken place, and recent developments indicate a change in the application of psychological theories to educational programs, models and systems. Moreover, the language of emotional life has an ethnolinguistic dimension; diverse peoples experience different emotions because they have different names for them, and vice versa. People have non-identical spectra of emotions, depending on their ways of life, family traditions, and language. Smileys in mass culture, including Facebook, influenced our understanding of emotions while minimizing and unifying the basic set of feelings. New smileys are welcomed by children who try do ascribe an emotion associated with the symbol, yet there are so many of them that it is difficult to differentiate their own feelings accordingly.

The specific features of the traditional attitude to children’s emotions, adopted in the theory of Soviet preschool education, differ from the Western theories of emotional development, although Western ideas have become increasingly widespread in Russian pedagogical discourse. The emotional component in preschool education serves as the basis for interpersonal communication and as mediator of values and attitudes relevant to a culture, although their repertoire in the literature read for children is very limited and only partly universal. There is a need for linguistic and cultural adaptation of concepts borrowed from English-language literature, inasmuch as modern children’s books often do not take into account the lexical and grammatical peculiarities of Russian expressions denoting emotional states.

Although the cognitive meaning of emotions was not unknown, the idea of emotional intelligence (intellect) was mostly ignored until recently. When the term emotional intelligence appeared in Russian psychology, it was understood as the human ability to process information, to determine the meaning and interrelations of emotions (Degtyarev, 2012). In the traditional Soviet/Russian approach, emotions exist objectively; there is an emotional norm for how to experience and express feelings which should be followed. The names of emotions are not as important as the possibility of describing one’s own emotional state. Examples of good and bad behavior are given and discussed, also in literature. Yet, western terms and ideas are gaining momentum (cf. Mustajoki & Protassova, 2012), and educational terms and ideas are among them. There is nothing wrong in naming emotions and discussing them, but the choice of words is still not natural for the Russian language. Psychologists should pay attention to the ways in which they try to teach people how to express emotions. After all, it seems that after the translation is fine-tuned, the terms from English will be introduced into Russian and these new meanings will be taught to very small children.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ekaterina Protassova

Dr. Ekaterina Protassova holds Ph.D. in Philology and Hab. in Pedagogy. She is Adjunct Professor in Russian language at the University of Helsinki. She has over 300 scholarly publications. She headed and participated in various international and national projects investigating language pedagogies, child and adult bilingualism, and the role of language and culture in immigrant integration. Her service to the profession includes editorial work for various journals and publishers and organization of seminars and conference panels.

Notes

1 This is a collection of emotion-related words, corpustext.com/reference/affect_wordnet.html

2 E.g., emojics.com/blog/emotional-analysis-vs-sentiment-analysis

3 It was almost always ‘he’ in the Russian texts; child, adult, teacher and kindergarten teacher are still ‘he’ in the documents.

4 A term used to speak about physical work done by children with the goal to acquire some necessary manual skills.

5 E.g., pryamaya.ru/lyudmila_petranovskaya_emotsionalnyy_intellekt_11.06.