Original scientific paper
An Investigation of Concepts and Words Used By Turkish Children and Teenagers to Define Their Perceptions Regarding Events Involving Emotional Situations
Nilüfer Özabacı
Abstract
The present study aimed to determine the concepts and words children and teenagers use to define their perceptions of
events that involve emotions. It attempted to identify words that children and teenagers use to express emotions and the
differences between children and teenagers in this regard. The study focused on 214 children and adolescents, including
124 students from four primary schools in Eskisehir, Turkey (59 girls and 65 boys) and 90 students from one secondary
school and two high schools (39 girls and 51 boys). The students were given a questionnaire that asked 10 questions focusing
on three emotional categories (happiness, sadness and fear), two types of self-descriptive adjectives (positive and
negative) and two neutral categories (semantically related and semantically unrelated). The questionnaire was developed
from a form used by Doost et al. (1999). We concluded that the positive and negative expressions used by both children
and teenagers were examined regardless of frequency of use, and the constituents, which were basically detected,
were gathered under definite titles.
Keywords
emotion; emotional words; emotional expressions
Hrčak ID:
68932
URI
Publication date:
24.6.2011.
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