The Relationship Between Dialectical Thinking and Emotion Understanding in Senior Preschool Children

This study aims to clarify the methodological status of the category “activity Theoretical foundations of the relationship between child’s cognitive and emotional development were formulated in the works of Russian and international authors. We consider a child's dialectical thinking genesis as one of the cognitive development lines. This research aimed to study the relationship between dialectical thinking and emotion understanding in older preschool children. It was assumed that there is a significant relationship between emotion understanding and the success of children in completing three particular dialectical tasks, such as overcoming contradictions, understanding the simplest developmental processes and making a creative product. This study included 148 children, aged 5—6. We evaluated the level of non-verbal intelligence, dialectical thinking and emotion understanding using the following techniques: “Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices”, “Drawing an unusual tree”, “Cycles”, “What can be both at the same time?” and the Russian version of the “Test of Emotion Comprehension”. Correlational analysis of the resulting data revealed significant relationships between non-verbal intelligence, indicators of dialectical thinking and the overall level of emotion understanding. When controlling non-verbal intelligence, linear hierarchical regression analysis was used to demonstrate a significant contribution of dialectical thinking to the dispersion of values according to the general level of emotion understanding. The research results are of practical importance and make it possible to use transforming (understanding the simplest developmental processes and making a creative product) and overcoming contradictions as developmental tasks when working with children aged 5—6.