Abstract
Emotional competence (EC) is important for children’s social adjustment and sustainable development. The present study designed a school based emotional competence learning (ECL) program and examined its effectiveness with 56 Chinese preschoolers aged 5–6. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine the impact of the ECL program on young children’s EC. Two upper Kindergarten classes (Daban) for children aged 5–6 were randomly assigned as experimental group (n = 31, 42% girls, Mage = 68.31 months, SD = 3.75) and control group (n = 25, 44% girls, Mage = 68.16 months, SD = 3.77). The experimental group was engaged in a 15-week ECL program, whereas the control group had similar duration courses without emotional competence training. All the children were administered the Test of Emotion Comprehension, Expression Identification Task, and Emotion Regulation Strategy Inventory before and after the intervention. The results indicated no significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test. In contrast, the experimental group outperformed the control group in most EC components in the post-test. Meanwhile, the experimental group demonstrated greater increases in EC components. The findings suggest that this ECL program has strong potential as a school-based, structured program for enhancing children’s emotional competence. The educational implications of these findings are discussed.
Highlights
Emotional competence is very important for a sustainable society and economy, especially in a competitive and stressful context such as Chinese society
The duration of each of the three stages can be varied. This table offers only suggested timings as other factors should be taken into account: the focus of the session, the reactions of children, if there is any form of conflict within the group, etc
We hypothesized that the experimental group would perform significantly better after the training intervention than their counterparts in the control group
Summary
Emotional competence is very important for a sustainable society and economy, especially in a competitive and stressful context such as Chinese society. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have put Chinese children into a very difficult and stressful situation, which will have a long-term and far-reaching negative impact on the sustainable development of the young generation [1,2]. In this pandemic context, emotional competence, especially emotion regulation strategies, are beneficial for children’s mental health [3,4,5]. Help children experience relevant emotion, illustrate the features and causes of emotions, and promote their understanding of emotion 15 min
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