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

Abstract

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.

A randomized controlled trial on the digital socio-emotional competence training Zirkus Empathico for preschoolers

“…Thus, as being easily accessible by the public with low costs, digital SEC trainings such as Zirkus Empathico could be implemented more widely as prevention strategies to reduce the risk for mental illness among children and adolescents. SEC trainings open the possibility to strengthen skills (e.g., creating meaningful relationships, recognizing and regulating emotions) which in return serve as protective factors for problematic behavior and to overcome social challenges 32 , 34 .…”

“…The most common mental health presentations in childhood include emotional (e.g., anxiety disorder: childhood prevalence 5.2%) 28 , 29 and behavioral difficulties (e.g., attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: childhood prevalence 3.7%) 28 , 30 . Preschool prevention and intervention programs often involve the strengthening of SEC 31 as it serves as an important resilience factor against psychological distress 32 – 34 . Children who are socially and emotionally competent have the skills and knowledge needed to build secure interpersonal relationships, regulate their emotions, cope with challenges, and better adjust to preschool 8 , 35 , 36 .…”

Validation of Italian students’ self-ratings on the SSIS SEL brief scales

“…The sample consisted of 1,175 children and adolescents attending primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary schools in Northern Italy. All participants were taking part in the large-scale PROMEHS universal intervention study which involved the design and testing of a school-based curriculum for the promotion of mental health that included a focus on enhancing SEL (e.g., Cefai et al, 2022 ; Colomeischi et al, 2022 ; Cavioni et al, 2023 ). However, for the purpose of this research, only the pre-test data were utilized.…”

Habilidades sociales en adolescentes desde la enseñanza virtual: Programa educativo de fortalecimiento en Amazonas-Perú

“…Al respecto, se encontró que un programa educativo tiene un enfoque prometedor para mejorar la autoevaluación (Surzykiewicz et al, 2022), las habilidades sociales y emocionales de los niños y adolescentes, disminuye las dificultades psicosociales, la internalización y externalización de problemas (Colomeischi et al, 2022), demuestra una mayor disposición para estudiar, menos aislamiento, menos problemas emocionales (depresión y ansiedad), así como que un mayor nivel y variedad de recursos personales (Camuñas et al, 2022) tienen un impacto significativo en el autoconcepto, un aumento en el ajuste conductual, la felicidad y la satisfacción (Veríssimo et al, 2022).…”