FEATURES OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE OF CHILDREN OF SENIOR PRESCHOOL AGE

The paper describes and analyzes the features of emotional intelligence at senior preschool age. Current trends of society emphasize the importance of forming a special group of human competencies, such as leadership, teamwork, reflective, public, and analytical abilities, which ensure overall performance within the intensive global communication. The ability to navigate in the world of one’s emotional states and partner’s experiences is one of the key abilities related to the so-called “soft skills”. In psychological research, it is called emotional intelligence and is described as an ability that can be improved from the preschool age.

The paper considers the set of parameters of emotional intelligence and describes their characteristic features in 5–7-year-old children. This is the recognition of basic emotions; mastering the ways of expressing emotions in facial expressions, pantomimic and prosodic; the beginning of the formation of the language of emotions, understanding of the content aspects of basic emotions and abilities for the elementary regulation of emotional states. The author distinguishes the contradictions and limitations that exist in the scientific interpretation of the emotional intelligence of preschoolers and offers an extended set of indicators of emotional intelligence with the inclusion of elementary emotional praxis, identification, and correlation of multimodal signs of emotion. To carry out the empirical assessment of the selected parameters, a diagnostic complex was developed and tested. It provides a wide range of information and makes it possible to identify the current level of development of this phenomenon. The results of the empirical study allow concluding that the components of emotional intelligence are formed unevenly at the senior preschool age. The formation of elementary emotional praxis and perceptual processes should be considered as basic for the development of the ability to understand and settle emotional experiences, provided the child learns the language of emotions. The author associates further research with the opportunity to optimize the indicators of emotional intelligence through the development of specific psychological and pedagogical conditions in a preschool educational organization.