Poster #206 - Experiences that induce negative emotional responses in Japanese university students since their childhood

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social, Emotional, Personality

Integrative Statement

Objectives:
Various problems such as refusal to attend school, bullying and Hikikomori or cocooning among young people are widely reported in Japan. It is suggested that the failure of their emotional control lies beneath these problems (Ballespi, et al., 2018). Ballespi, st al.(2018) suggested that childhood behavioral inhibition is associated with impaired mentalizing in adolescence. Similarly, the importance of relationship between emotional intelligence and social adaptation is emphasized by Salovey & Mayer (1990). Moreover, Nozaki (2012) revealed that college students in Japan who had higher emotional intelligence tend to be higher resilience. However, there has been no research on what sorts of emotional experiences through childhood to adolescent actually relate to the emotional intelligence of college students.
Thus, the aim of our study is to clarify what type of the negative emotional experiences since childhood influence the emotional intelligence in adolescents. In order to pursue this aim, we extracted concrete emotional experiences (especially negative and serious ones) from college students since their childhood and analyzed them by using a qualitative method. This poster mainly presents the results of this qualitative analyses on what type of experiences induce negative emotional responses in Japanese university students since their childhood

Method:
Participants: 5 students in their senior year in college of education at a private university (Gender: 2 males and 3 females/ Average age: 22 years old)
Interviews: Semi-structured interview: 45 to90 minutes per person (on average 60 minutes). In order to extract serious emotional experiences in Japanese university students, the following questions were asked: ①Who were the most significant to you (including your parents) when you are in your preschool age? What are the episodes with that person that you still remember? ②What were the episodes which you still remember in terms of relationships among people(family members, and friends and teachers at school and at after school activities)in your school age (elementary school, junior high school, and high school). ③Was there a person whom you could trust and talk to when you were suffering.
Procedure: All the interviews were recorded by IC recorder, and then they were transcribed.
Analysis: First, KJ method was used to divide the positive and the negative experiences in the student’s inter-personal relationships (family, school friends, and so on) Second, the M-GTA method was used to create new sub-categories. One other person (graduate student) conducted same analysis on about 30% of the all data. The concordance rate between two people was 88%.

Results and discussion
Protocol analyses of negative experience indicates 5 basic categories and 16 sub-categories. The results are shown in Table 1. The results of analyses show that serious emotional experiences were often attributed to the maladaptation of the interpersonal relationships (among the family, school friends, teachers, etc.). Thus, it is necessary for Japanese children in their growth process to get well trained to adapt themselves to various interpersonal environments. Through this, children can acquire an ability to control their negative emotions. The results of data-mining and text analysis will also be reported in the poster presentation.

Authors

• Maiko Kakuwa, Tamagawa University
  Presenting Author

• Sayuri Takahira, Tamagawa university
  Non-Presenting Author