Gender differences in emotion expression in preschool children

The main purpose of the diploma thesis is to research how often, in which situations and how do preschool girls and boys express their emotions. I start the theoretical part by explaining general characteristics of emotions, following by characteristics of individual basic emotions, namely joy, anger, sadness and fear. After that I present an overview of the development of emotions and the role of preschool teacher in the emotional development of children. At the end I focus on gender differences and introduce biological differences, gender stereotypes, gender differentiated emotion socialization and differences between boys and girls in the emotion expression. In the empirical part I present a detailed analysis of the data obtained in the study on the emotion expression in preschool children, which was conducted by H. Smrtnik Vitulić and S. Prosen. I was interested, in which situations and how do preschool children express basic emotions. I also examine whether there are statistically significant gender differences in the frequency of expression of basic emotions in preschool children. The results showed that between boys and girls there are no statistically significant differences in the frequency of expression of basic emotions. The biggest differences between the sexes in situations that trigger basic emotions were in situation before performance, when a child missed loved ones, when a child didn’t get something and when a child achieved something. The biggest differences between the sexes in emotion expression were in expressing sadness in the form of rubbing eyes, fear in the form of rocking/shifting from one foot to the other, joy with laughter and anger in the form of restlessness