La interaccion entre el relato del mundo televisivo y de la vida real en el proceso de construccion emocional infantil

Abstract

According to the social constructivist perspective adopted as a theoretical basis for this thesis, emotions are social products depending on the social experience and the cultivation of individual sensitivities, which are also based on beliefs, formed by the language and derived from the culture. For this reason, this investigation, instead of regarding emotions in childhood in terms of evolutive development, focuses on the process of the construction of emotional meaning through the language and the interaction of the child with different meaning systems, within real life experiences and the world of television. In the view of a qualitative methodology and focusing on individual and group interviews, boys and girls aged 8-9 were taken into account, residents of a city in the north of Chile, belonging to different socioeconomic levels. This allowed an analysis of the child discourse, which among its main conclusions finds out that is not the television that sets an emotive mark on the children but their own life that is projected in the production of meaning of the media content. An area where this is shown more clearly is in the educative appropriation and the expectations that the children have, especially regarding the affective relationships among the main characters of their favorite series. In this context it is useful to pay attention to the ways and the routines in which the contents of television and emotions are treated into the conversations within the family and school. This might be a tool way to take advantage of the special characteristics of the television media, and specially its attraction in this age, to contribute to a healthy development in terms of the emotional life.

Date of Award	12 Feb 2007
Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Supervisor	Miguel Rodrigo Alsina (Director)