FEATURES OF UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS REFLECTED IN NARRATIVE AND LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS BY JUNIOR SCHOOLCHILDREN WITH MENTAL DEVELOPMENT DELAYS
Authors:   Moscow City Pedagogical University, Urozhaeva A. V. 
Published: December 2024

Introduction. The article examines the specifics of understanding by primary school children with development delays of various emotions reflected in narrative and landscape paintings on a single theme of the visual (pictorial) text “Rain”. From a theoretical standpoint, the study is based on the position of a specific path of child development as a special process of appropriation of socio-cultural experience, where emotions act as a functional organ of the individual, a symbol of the child’s subculture. The relevance of studying the features of understanding emotions depicted in narrative and landscape paintings is substantiated, on the one hand, by the insufficiency of psychological studies of the issues of understanding the pictorial text in landscape and narrative painting by children of this category, and on the other hand, by the importance of studying the problem of awareness of emotions as a cognitive function for the socialization of primary school children with development delays. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of understanding the language of expression of emotions reflected in different genres of paintings (landscape and narrative) on a single theme “Rain” by primary school children with development delays and compare them with the features of understanding of normally developing peers.
Materials and methods. The diagnostic tool is an ascertaining experiment based on the use of the “Study of Perception of Pictures” technique adapted for primary school children with development delays, a conversation about the picture, quantitative and qualitative analysis, the use of methods of mathematical and statistical processing and interpretation of data according to the Mann-Whitney technique.
Research results. An empirical study aimed at studying the understanding of emotions reflected in narrative and landscape works on the same theme “Rain” allowed us to reveal the psychological features of this process in younger schoolchildren with development delays (in comparison with normally developing peers), which is characterized by: heterogeneity, multi-level quantitative and criterion-based qualitative characteristics expressing the understanding of the artistic language of different emotions (joy and sadness) in reproductions. The use of both narrative and landscape works in the diagnostics of understanding emotions turned out to be informative and made it possible to conduct a comparative analysis of their expressive means in different genre paintings by younger schoolchildren with mental development delays.
Conclusion. The experiment confirmed the hypothesis put forward about the presence of features of understanding by younger schoolchildren with development delays of different emotions (joy and sadness) reflected in landscape and narrative paintings united by a common theme (“Rain”), which are revealed in criterion-based, multi-level qualitative characteristics. The possibility of using not only narrative but also landscape paintings in diagnostics of understanding emotions is shown. Involvement of narrative and landscape paintings of the same theme “Rain” in the experiment allowed to determine the degree of understanding of the similarities and differences in the expression of different emotions (joy and sadness) in different genre paintings by younger schoolchildren with development delays. The study also confirmed the theoretical position on the unity of the patterns of mental development of normally developing preschoolers and children with development delays, which is manifested in the context of understanding the emotions reflected in a painting of the same theme, at the stage of school childhood.