Abstract
Bullying behavior alters the way in which students coexist together in the classroom and negatively affects adolescents’ well-being. Research highlights the importance of emotional skills in promoting positive youth development and optimal social functioning. Therefore, education in these skills is a potential target for interventions aimed at reducing cyberbullying and promoting satisfaction with life during adolescence. This study analyzes the impact of an emotion education program in adolescents to promote classroom coexistence and well-being. The sample comprised 148 students from 7th and 8th grade of secondary school aged between 12 and 15 years (Mage = 12.63, SDage = 0.74; 57% girls). A quasi-experimental design with longitudinal data collection was used in this study with randomized classroom assignment to the experimental group and the control group. The intervention program was based on the emotional intelligence model of Mayer and Salovey (1997). Its objective was to develop adolescents’ emotional skills to improve the quality of interpersonal relationships and reduce conflicts between peers, positively influencing coexistence and well-being. The intervention took place in eleven sessions during school hours over a period of 3 months. Participants completed the emotional competence questionnaire, the cyberbullying scale and the life satisfaction scale before (T1), immediately after (T2), and 6 months after the intervention (T3). The results showed that the intervention program reduced victimization and assault via mobile phones and the Internet in T2 and T3. In the follow-up (T3), the intervention group had enhanced emotional perception and regulation skills and reported an increase in life satisfaction in comparison to the control group. Our findings suggest that implementing classroom intervention programs to develop students’ emotional competencies could be beneficial for their subjective well-being and peer coexistence.
Highlights
Learning to live together is a necessary and fundamental objective for the integral development of a student’s personality (Olweus and Limber, 2010)
The preselected students were randomly divided into two groups: the experimental group, composed of 168 participants, and the control group, composed of 192 adolescents who participated in an alternative intervention proposed by the school
The results of MANOVA with baseline scores (Table 1) indicated that there were no differences between the intervention and the control group in T1 (Wilks’ lambda, λ = 0.964, F(104) = 0.651, p = 0.689, η = 0.036)
Summary
Learning to live together is a necessary and fundamental objective for the integral development of a student’s personality (Olweus and Limber, 2010). The benefits of emotional competencies on classroom coexistence and their positive impact on bullying prevention and adolescents’ well-being have been studied over the last few decades (e.g., Schokman et al, 2014; Elipe et al, 2015; Marikutty and Joseph, 2016). To address this problem, intervention programs have been designed to prevent traditional bullying and cyberbullying behavior (Ttofi and Farrington, 2010; Zych et al, 2015). Bullying prevention programs that focus on social-emotional development and include aspects of adolescents’ subjective well-being are rare (Durlak et al, 2011). This study attempts to fill these gaps by evaluating the effectiveness of a social-emotional education program to promote coexistence in the classroom in relation to cyberbullying behaviors and the impact on adolescents’ well-being over 6 months
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