Emotional competence in pre-school children: preliminary evidence of a psycho-educational intervention.

Emotional competence (EC) plays a crucial role in childhood and is fundamental to children’s ability to interact and form relationships with others. Although current literature shows a growing interest towards affective education, it is rather difficult to identify valid operationalizations and effective training programs in pre-schoolers. The aim of this study is to test a psycho-educational intervention fostering the development of EC (expression, understanding and regulation of emotions) in pre-school children. A number of 82 Italian children (42 female) aged between 3 and 5 years participated to the training programme. The training consisted of 10 weekly small group sessions that took place in kindergartens for a period of three months. Sessions had specific aims, such as encouraging cooperative play, developing social competence and emotion recognition ability, and were characterized by: active workshop methodologies, hands-on activities and dynamic participation. Before the beginning of the programme and at the end of it, the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) was administrated individually to each child. The TEC assesses the understanding of emotions in children through a series of cartoon scenarios and the child is requested to choose among four possible emotional outcomes depicted by facial expressions. Results of repeated measure ANOVA show an improvement of TEC scores from baseline to 3 months (p < .001), with no differences between boys and girls (p = n.s.). The present study suggests that early psycho-educational programs, based on storytelling and drama, may have the potential to exert a positive influence on kindergarten children’s EC.