The Relationship‘ Emotional Identification – Individual Social Behavior’ in Hearing Impaired Children Integrated into a General Education Environment

The article focuses on the relationship between emotional identification and individual social behavior in children with hearing impairment who are integrated into a general educational environment. This suggests a study of the specific characteristics of emotional identification and strategies of individual social behavior in children with hearing impairment and their hearing peers. The study involved 32 children of preschool age (N=32, 5 – 7 years of age), educated in general kindergartens. The experimental group included 14 children (heterogeneous group according to auditory status), and the control group – 18 hearing children. The following methods were used: Emotional Faces and Individual Social Behavior. The results showed that the hearing children did better in terms of basic assessment of other people’s emotions than the children with hearing impairment. It was found that negative emotions were better identified by children with hearing experience compared to their deaf peers. Moreover, the hearing impaired children, compared to the control group, are more likely to seek a peers’ attention, follow them in their activities, join their play and express positive emotions towards them. The relationship between the characteristics of emotional identification and the categories of individual social behavior was confirmed. Differences were found in the structure of the relationship between the characteristics of emotional identification and the categories of social behavior in hearing impaired and hearing children.