ИСТИНА

In this study the relationship between dialectical thinking skills and emotion recognition among preschoolers was analyzed. A random sample of participants was recruited from kindergartens located in Moscow. Participants of the study were 152 typically developing children (53,9% boys). The age of children was 6-7 years (M = 79.99 months, SD = 4.43). All parents provided informed consent for their children participation in the current study. The study was agreed with the Ethical Committee of the Russian Psychological Society. Dialectical thinking was assessed using three techniques aimed at analyzing children's understanding of (a) the principle of cyclicality, (b) ability to identify contradictions and (c) ability to find opposites to phenomena. The Affect Recognition was used to determine children's emotion recognition. A number of parents was interviewed using the questionnaire, which allowed for additional analysis of associations between dialectical thinking and demographic variables such as the number of children in families, the level of mother's education and family income level. Spearman correlation analysis revealed statistically significant links between emotion recognition and the ability of children to find opposites to phenomena. A possible explanation for these results may be that successful understanding of emotions requires the presence in the worldview of well-established ideas about the variability and repeatability of emotional experiences, as well as the reasons for the emergence of certain emotional reactions. Funding: This research was funded by Russian Science Foundation grant number №19-18-00521.