The role of emotional awareness in primary school : examining the impact of group intervention in scholastic context

Emotional awareness is a key component of children’s psychological, cognitive and social development in primary school, and it is a central element of learning. The emotional development aimed to achieve an emotional maturity can help children to manage the needs of their social and educational environments, to keep good relationships with peers, and express emotions in adaptive manners having a positive effect on scholastic integration and academic performance. The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing a psychoeducational group intervention aimed to improve emotional health, quality of integration and children’s scholastic skills. This study is designed as a 4-year longitudinal study. A total of 200 children (94 Males; M Age = 7.22 years; SD = 0.97 years) from 8 different classes, completed the Pictures of Facial Affect (Ekman, 1972), the Drawn Stories Technique (Trombini, 1994), the Classroom Drawing (Quaglia, Saglione,1990), Colored Progressive Matrices (Raven, J. C. 1983). Group intervention based on different psychoeducational activities per year was provided to 4 classes and tests were administered at baseline and at retest both to the experimental groups and to the control groups every year. The mixed-model ANOVA revealed a significant main effect for POFA score over time (F = 6.24, p =.01) and between POFA and group (F = 4.82, p= .03) but no significant main effect has been found for classroom drawing over time (F= .81, p > .05) and between quality of integration and group intervention. These results suggest that intervention was successful to improve children emotional recognition but it has no a significant effect on scholastic integration probably for the complexity of scholastic environment. These findings support the importance of a psychoeducational program in school in promoting of emotional health but the relation of cognitive skills, emotional awareness and quality of integration require more observations.