The Development of Social and Emotional Intelligences in the COVID era: What Effect on the Maintenance and Remission of Internalizing Symptoms? A longitudinal Study in a Primary School Sample

Introduction: The COVID-19 breakdown put a great strain on the general population worldwide in terms of reduced mental health and increasing internalizing symptoms such as anxiety and depression. In sucha context, primary school children constitute a vulnerable population for the onset of these kinds ofsymptoms because of the great number of challenges and changes in children's social and educationallandscape due to the lockdown measures. Particularly, children from 6-11 years old start to develop their social-emotional functioning in terms of abilities and self-perception, especially at school with peers and teachers, and the socio-emotional developmental path could be hindered during a critical event of that kind. This three-wave longitudinal study aimed to explore how children's self-perceptions of their trait emotional Intelligence (trait EI) and Social Intelligence (SI) change over time and examine the effect that trait emotional intelligence could have on the remission or maintenance of anxiety and depression overtime after the COVID-19 outbreak.Methods: A total of 169 primary school children completed all three waves of data collection. Four self-report questionnaires were used to assess trait Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Anxiety, and Depression respectively. Latent Growth Curve Models (LGM), based on structural equation modeling, were used to test variableschanges over time.Results: Only Social Awareness (SA), among the dimensions of Social Intelligence, significantly increases over time while trait EI significantly decreases over time. As regards internalizing symptoms, bothscholastic and environmental anxiety significantly decrease over time while depression remains stable over time. Finally, only Social Skills were found as significant predictors for a decrease in scholasticanxiety but not for depression levels while trait Emotional intelligence was found as a predictor of less anxiety and depression levels at the starting point but not as a predictor of their changes over time