BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Influence of Culture on Personality and Emotional Development: Insights from Biology, Measurement, and PsychopathologyView all 3 articles
Internal migrant preschoolers: life changes serve better emotion understanding?
Provisionally accepted
- Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia
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This study investigates the impact of internal migration on emotion understanding in 6–7-year-old preschoolers, comparing children who relocated to Moscow within the past three years to their non-migrant peers. The study involved 182 neurotypical, native Russian-speaking children aged 6-7 from Moscow kindergartens, who were divided into a migrant (n=71) and a non-migrant group (n=111). Using the Russian adaptation of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), the research assessed three hierarchical levels of emotion understanding: external, mental, and reflective. Results showed that internal migrant children demonstrated significantly higher reflective emotion understanding, while no differences were found in external or mental levels. These findings suggest that migration-related challenges may foster the development of higher-order emotional competencies through exposure to diverse emotional experiences. The study interprets these results through Vygotsky's concept of the social situation of development and Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory. Despite its stressors, internal migration appears to serve as a developmental resource for enhancing emotion understanding in young children.
Keywords: emotion understanding, TEC, internal migration, Migrant children, preschoolers
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 28 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gavrilova, Karimova, Solopova, Veraksa and Yakushina. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anastasia Yakushina, anastasia.ya.au@yandex.ru
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