An intervention promoting understanding of achievement emotions with middle school students

Can a web application foster emotional competence in children and adolescents? The case of PandHEMOT®

The COVID-19 pandemic has had many traumatic consequences for the physical and psychological functioning of children and adolescents. Internet-based interventions can reach a large audience and be a potentially powerful resource for promoting well-being among young people. We tested the efficacy of the web application PandHEMOT®, developed ad hoc for increasing knowledge about pandemics, emotions, and emotion regulation. We involved a sample of 147 Italian third and seventh graders. The sample was assigned to an experimental (participating in the training) and a waitlist condition (who participated following a waitlist design). All the participants completed pretest and posttest measures. The intervention was structured into three units. The training took place between November and December 2021. Generalized linear mixed models and linear mixed models revealed that knowledge about pandemics, emotions, emotion regulation, and metacognitive awareness increased for the experimental condition. Moreover, adolescents performed better than children. The findings supported the efficacy of an Internet-based training for increasing children and adolescents' resilience, according to the standards of evidence-based research.

Impact of a School Mental Health Program on Children's and Adolescents' Socio-Emotional Skills and Psychosocial Difficulties

The challenges of today's society demand high levels of socio-emotional skills in children and adolescents; therefore, mental health is an important issue to be addressed and promoted in schools. The present study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a school mental health program (Promoting Mental Health at Schools; PROMEHS) designed to promote socio-emotional learning and prevent psychosocial difficulties in children and adolescents. The study was conducted on a sample of 1392 students (evaluated by 104 teachers) from kindergarten (n = 446), primary school (n = 426), secondary school (n = 354), and high school (n = 166). A quasi-experimental study design with experimental and waitlist control groups was used to evaluate the program's effectiveness. Students were non-randomly assigned to the experimental (n = 895) and control group (n = 497). Students belonging to the experimental group received one-hour lessons once a week for 12 weeks. The teachers evaluated their students' social-emotional skills, strengths, and difficulties before and after the intervention. The results indicated the effectiveness of the PROMEHS program in improving social-emotional skills for all school levels, reducing internalizing problems in primary and secondary school chil-dren, and reducing externalizing issues for kindergarten and primary school children. The PROMEHS program is a promising approach to enhancing childrens' and adolescents' social and emotional skills and to decreasing psychosocial difficulties, such as internalizing and externalizing problems.

Reading with induced worry: The role of physiological self-regulation and working memory updating in text comprehension

BACKGROUND

An interplay of emotional and cognitive aspects underlies academic performance. We focused on the contribution of such interplay to text comprehension.

AIMS

We investigated the effect of worry on comprehension and the role of two potential moderators of this effect: physiological self-regulation as resting heart rate variability (HRV) and working memory updating.

SAMPLE

Eighty-two seventh graders were involved in a quasi-experimental design.

METHODS

Students read an informational text in one of two reading conditions: to read for themselves to know more (n = 46; low-worry condition) or to gain the highest score in a ranking (n = 36; high-worry condition). Students' resting HRV was recorded while watching a video of a natural scenario. The executive function of working memory updating was also assessed. After reading, students completed a comprehension task.

RESULTS

Findings revealed the moderating role of HRV in the relationship between induced worry and text comprehension. In the high-worry condition, students with higher resting HRV performed better than students who read under the same instructions but had lower HRV. In contrast, in the low-worry condition, students with higher resting HRV showed a lower performance as compared to students with lower HRV. Finally, working memory updating was positively related to text comprehension.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings indicate that the cognitive component of anxiety, that is, worry, plays a role in performing a fundamental learning activity like text comprehension. The importance of physiological self-regulation emerges clearly. In a condition of high worry, higher ability to regulate emotions and thoughts acts as a protective factor.

Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions and Its Relevance to School Psychology

The control-value theory (CVT) of achievement emotions is a well-established theoretical framework which delineates the predictive relationships among distal and proximal antecedents, academic emotions, and student engagement and achievement. Although most research anchored in CVT is conducted by educational psychologists, the theory is arguably applicable to the field of school psychology. In this article, we first provide a brief overview of the theory, with a specific focus on the proximal antecedents (i.e., cognitive appraisals), as well as academic emotions and performance. Given that school psychologists are often consulted with strategies regarding students’ emotional challenges exhibited in the classroom, we then discuss empirical evidence of control- and value-based interventions (e.g., attributional retraining, utility-value), both of which can be posited to address the cognitive appraisals of achievement emotions. Lastly, we discuss the implications of CVT and control- and value-based interventions to school psychologists’ work.