This study is about developing a musical activity program for the emotion regulation of children, and analyzing its effectiveness. In this study, for the emotion regulation of children, stability through the decrease of negative emotion and the enhanc...
This study is about developing a musical activity program for the emotion regulation of children, and analyzing its effectiveness. In this study, for the emotion regulation of children, stability through the decrease of negative emotion and the enhancement of both cognitive mechanism and behaviral mechanism was judged as adaptive emotion regulation. A program was developed and in this process, environmental causes were also explored and applied to the program. The musical activity program for the emotion regulation of children is constructed of model, object and goal, category formation, and teacher?s role system. The program’s object is for children to not excessively express or suppress their emotion and control their emotion properly when children are in an emotional conflict situation. In cognitive mechanism, the category was formed for the object of care regulation, awareness of own emotion, realization of the emotion of others, and enhancement of emotion regulation strategy. In behaviral mechanism, the category was formed for the object of proper expression of language and enhancement of behavior regulation. Moreover, a program for the decrease of negative emotion was made with the object of decrease of anxiety, depression, aggression, and impulsiveness, and an individual’s enhancement of cognitive mechanism and behaviral mechanism and decrease of negative emotion was formed to be realized in the context of acceptance and regulation, a musical activity.
There are three stages in the program’s form, which are awareness, acceptance, and regulation. In the program, awareness and acceptance is focused in the beginning, and awareness, acceptance, and regulation are focused in the middle stage. In the final stage, the focus is on the regulation of oneself in exchanging situations. The programs was composed on the basis of category and form. 32 program activities were developed in stages.
The effectiveness verification of the developed program was realized, and the object of study was above 5 to below 6 year old children of A kindergarten in S city, A and B, total of 74 children participated in the research with 37 people in the experimental group and 37 children in the comparative group. The developed musical activity program was treated in the experimental group, and an emotion regulation educational program using fairy tale books was conducted in the comparative group. The experiment treatment was conducted twice a week from May 18th, 2011 to October 6th, 2011. SPSS 18.0 Program was used for the analysis of collected data.
The study indicates that the children in the experimental group who participated in the musical program had a higher score in positive emotion regulation, negative emotion regulation, and emotion regulation than the comparative group, and also had a higher score in negative emotions which are anxiety, depression, aggression, and impulsiveness. In addition, the decrease of negative emotion had an effect on the enhancement of emotion regulation. This can be presumed by the positive emotion of music, which reduced and stabilized negative emotion. In other words, this musical activity program promoted positive emotion, and enhanced the stability through decreased negative emotion and the emotion regulation ability of children by the enhancement of cognitive mechanism and active mechanism. Consequently, the musical activity program for children was effective in enhancing children?s emotion regulation and decreasing negative emotion than the comparative group. This result indicates that the musical activity program is effective in enhancing children?s emotion regulation.