Improving emotional competence in early adolescence: A school-based intervention

Following the psychological literature, we conceptualised emotional competence as the ability to express, understand, and regulate emotions. Expression of emotions refers to the possibility of communicating emotions both verbally and non-verbally; understanding of emotions refers to the wealth of knowledge that people have about the characteristics of emotions, their causes, and the possibility of controlling them; and regulation of emotions refers to those strategies the people use to manage the duration, intensity, or latency of their emotions. The main aim was to verify the efficacy of a training for improving emotional competence in middle school students. We involved more than 200 sixth and seventh-graders from Italy, divided into an experimental and a control group. Participants in the experimental group took part in a 4-unit intervention. Both groups, before and after the intervention, completed paper-and-pencil questionnaires assessing their knowledge about facial expressions of emotions, emotional lexicon, and emotion regulation strategies. The training was called “A compass for emotions”. Each unit comprised both online and more traditional onsite activities. The online activities consisted of completing a level of an app (adapted from a web application developed for a previous project about pandemics and emotions, i.e., PandHEMOT) using tablets and headphones. The onsite activities consisted of games or tasks to be completed individually or in groups. The first unit focused on the facial expressions of emotions, the second unit on emotional lexicon, the third unit on the intensity of emotions, and the last unit on emotion regulation strategies. Then, we conducted some statistical analyses to verify whether the participants in the experimental group increased their emotional competence after participating in the training. For all the three measures, we found an increase, in the post-training phase compared to the pre-training phase, only for the experimental group and not for the control group. Our training can be considered efficacious in ameliorating adolescents’ emotional competence.