Psychological Differences of Intellectual and Emotional Spheres of Boys and Girls at Preschool Age

Preschool age is a period of improvement, personal development, which is characterized by individual features. The importance of the study of age-related characteristics of the emotional sphere of children is determined by the fact that there is a close relationship between emotional and intellectual development. It has been noted that violations in emotional development of preschool children lead to inability of use of other abilities, in particular intelligence, for further development. As a working hypothesis of the study we have taken a provision that boys and girls at senior preschool age had differences in intellectual, emotional and volitional development. The study included 300 preschool children aged 6-7 years in the city of Moscow and the Moscow region. A mandatory condition for inclusion in the survey was a voluntary written informed consent of the child's legal representatives. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage with the help of the psycho-diagnostic techniques, there were assessed the levels of verbal and social intelligence. In the second phase, there were studied the emotional and volitional spheres of the boys and girls. Statistical processing of the data included a comparative analysis of the average group indices, for statistical significance assessment, there was used the t-student test for unrelated samples. It has been found that verbal intelligence of the senior preschool girls in the sphere of associative thinking was higher than in the boys (p = 0.027), and the amount of vocabulary at the beginning of the girls schooling was much bigger. The boys were more aggressive than the girls (p < 0.001), but the girls were more anxious (p = 0.027). In addition, the senior preschool boys had higher arbitrariness of verbal communication than the girls (p < 0.001), they were more intellectually productive in situations of positive emotional reinforcement (p < 0.001). This factor must be considered in the process of training of preschool children, especially in evaluation of their intellectual activity

Cognition · Developmental psychology · Emotional intelligence · Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test · Statistical significance · Vocabulary · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development · Human Health and Disease · Psychology · Psychology of Development and Education