The effect of interactive child yoga on the emotional expression and emotional diversity of 6-YEAR-old children

Yoga practices for children increase their self-awareness utilizing breathing exercises, meditation and emotion sharing along with the poses, and therefore provide an opportunity for them to be aware of and express their emotions. It is considered that yoga practices for children have a role in improving the ability to express themselves better and increasing the diversity of their emotional expression over time. In this study, emotional awareness of 6-year-old children based on whether they received an interactive child yoga training for a certain period of time or not was compared. The aim was to examine whether there would be any difference in their emotional expressions or the diversity of their expressions before and after the training. The target population of this research is 6-year-old kindergarten students continuing their education in Ankara. The sample of the research is the 6-year-old students of a private school in Ankara. The data obtained from the participants with the Assessment of Children's Emotion Skills and the Assessment Form for Diversity of Emotion Verbalization Skills by conducting a quasi-experimental research were analyzed. As the number of groups was less than 30, the data do not follow a normal distribution; the Mann-Whitney U and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests were applied to compute the p-value, as they are used for comparisons between non-parametric groups. According to the findings of the study, it is concluded that interactive children's yoga practices have a significant effect on the emotion recognition, understanding, verbalization skills of 6-year-old children and it contributes to the diversity of their emotional expression. In conclusion, it is observed that children's emotional awareness and emotional expression skills have improved throughout the interactive children's yoga training sessions. A while after the training, it was found that the group that received the training maintained its advantage in terms of emotional expression skills, therefore it can be said that the effect of the training is permanent. Keywords: Yoga for children, emotional expression, diversity of emotional expression, emotional awareness