Emotions are an integral part of “classroom life” and are experienced in teacher-student interactions quite often (Hosotani & Imai-Matsumura, 2011). The present study focuses on teachers’ emotions in classrooms. Its purpose is to establish which emotions are expressed by teachers in their interactions with students, the triggering situations of the two mostfrequent emotions, and their level of intensity and suitability. Teachers’ emotions were observed by students of primary education during their practical experience work, in grades one to five. They used a scheme constructed for observing different aspects of emotions. The observations of 108 teachers in 93 primary schools from various Slovenian regions weregathered. The results show that primary school teachers express various pleasant and unpleasant emotions, with unpleasant emotions prevailing. The average frequency of teachers’ emotion expression decreased from grade one to five. Anger was the most frequently expressed emotion (N = 261), followed by joy (N = 151). Teachers’ anger and joy were triggered in different situations: anger predominantly when students lacked disciplineand joy predominantly in situations of students’ academic achievement. The intensity of expressed anger and joy was moderate in all five grades, while the assessed suitability of these two emotions was high.

Generativity, Generative action, Transition, Croatia, Slovenia,

In the article, the author summarizes the main findings of research aimed at examining the differences between the parents' and the adolescent daughters' perception of family interactions (relating to important qualities of parenting and the family competence) in the period of childhood and adolescence, as well as their connectedness to the psychosocial development of family members (especially adolescent daughters). The research is based on Beavers' (Beavers & Hampson, 1993) systems model of family functioning and Erikson's (1980) theory of psychosocial development. The research included two-parent families of female adolescents. The main findings of the research are that daughters and their parents perceive the interactions in the family system differently. The daughters' evaluations were the lowest, i.e., the most critical. All family members experienced a drop in the quality of interaction during adolescence. In terms of perceiving family interaction, the families became clearly divided on the competence continuum into two groups. Correlations between the family's competence and the level of the adolescents' psychosocial development were significant, albeit not high, as were the correlations between the levels of psychosocial development of the parents and the adolescents.

In the present study, the experience of fear in various stimulus situations (involving animals, accidents, and violence) and its regulation by the cognitive reappraisal strategy in 46 psychology students was analyzed. The students self-assessed their experience of fear via questionnaires and a computerized task. In the questionnaires, the intensity of the experience of fear in everyday situations and the frequency of cognitive reappraisal strategy use were measured. In the computer application, photos eliciting fear were presented under two conditions: the first involved experiencing the photos and the continuation of this experience, while the second involved experiencing the photos followed by the use of the cognitive reappraisal strategy. The results confirm differences between the various stimulus situations. When measured with the questionnaires, the most intense fear was reported in situations involving accidents, whereas violence triggered the most intense fear while experiencing the photos. When the students continued to experience a photo, their experience of fear intensified significantly, but when they regulated their experience using cognitive reappraisal, their fear decreased. However, the intensity of the regulated fear was not connected to the frequency of the everyday use of cognitive reappraisal, as reported in the questionnaire. The study confirms the importance of contextual factors when experiencing and regulating fear.

Problems in vulnerable families are multilayered and include the intersection of physical, psychosocial and other forms of distress. The multidimensional nature of the problems of these families is closely linked to the fact that there are many institutions in the field of education, social welfare, health care and others, in which treatment and support are not satisfactory or adapted to their needs. The article presents the partial results of a large-scale qualitative research study, results that refer to the position of vulnerable families in the context of preschool education. The study examined how vulnerability is experienced by parents of preschool children, how the expert workers in the preschools involved in the study responded to the parents’ vulnerability, and how they cooperated with experts from other services outside the preschool. A qualitative research method was used in the study. Data was collected partly through semi-structured interviews with various expert workers employed in two preschools, as well as with the parents of children in the preschools; the interviews were conducted individually and in focus groups. Using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), we have identified four representative themes: amongst parents, the two recurring themes can be subsumed under the headings “from door to door” and “adaptation/flexibility”, and amongst experts, under the headings “powerlessness/incompetence/lack of information” and “power/innovation/sensitivity”. The study finds that the ability to effectively contend with vulnerability presumes a reconceptualisation of the attitude of institutional preschool education towards the family, including a change in the professional role of preschool teachers.