Abstract

CARDOSO, Ariela Santana  and  CASTRO, Thiago Gomes De. Conceptual analysis of the expression "socioemocional" in psychology articles. Psicol. educ. [online]. 2020, n.51, pp. 31-41. ISSN 1414-6975.  http://dx.doi.org/10.23925/2175-3520.2020i51p31-41.

The use of the expression 'socioemotional' has become increasingly frequent in current psychological literature. However, it's meaning and operational demarcations in research evaluation often do not converge to a homogeneous understanding. Considering the current relevance of the topic in psychological research, the present study sought to analyze the concept usage from its application and operationalization contexts. A search for articles published in journals of Psychology between 2005 and 2015 was conducted by consulting Web of Science, PsycInfo, Scielo and PePSIC databases. The terms "socioemotional" and "psychology" were used in English and Portuguese languages. The conceptual analysis sought to verify the contexts of enunciation, the connective terms, and the degree of operational explanation of the uses of the expression 'socioemotional'. The search returned 198 articles which, after filtering, considering only the inclusion of non-repeated empirical studies, retained 74 articles for the conceptual analysis. The results showed a prevalence of publications in the areas of education and developmental psychology. Altogether, 26 connective terms were recorded in association with the expression 'socioemotional'. Studies in which the expression did not present an explicit definition in its enunciation prevailed. It was concluded that although the usage of the expression 'socioemotional' is increasing in psychological literature, its heterogeneous circulation and operationalization demonstrates a probabilistic structure of the concept, referring to an unclear theoretical basis in the explanation of the constructs and a strong emphasis on evaluation techniques to define the use of the expression 'socioemotional'.

Keywords : Terminology of psychology; Emotional responses; Literature review; Scientific research; Semantics.

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