Il Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) per bambini dai 3 ai 10 anni: Proprietà psicometriche, punteggi di riferimento e utilizzo in ambito tipico e atipico [The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) for children aged 3 to 10: Factorial structure, normative scores and use in typical and atypical assessment]

This paper is aimed at providing further psychometric robustness to the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC), a standardized tool for assessing emotion comprehension in childhood. The study explores the factorial structure, gender and age invariance in a large sample of children from Northern and Central Italy (N = 1,478, M = 755; F = 723) aged 3 to 10 years, identifying the pattern of age-normative development across six-month intervals. The confirmatory factorial analysis supports the original psychometric structure of the TEC. Implications for typical and atypical assessment and for research purpose are discussed

The PROMEHS project: a comprehensive multi-component curriculum to promote mental health in schools

Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, copes with the normal stresses of life, works productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community (WHO, 2014). Mental health problems among children have been increasing over the past decades. This underlines the urgent need for early intervention, with schools providing a unique opportunity for the promotion of mental health of students. This study describes the goals and methodology of PROMEHS, a European project aimed to develop an evidence-based curriculum to promote mental health at school. PROMEHS will also promote innovation in educational policies in collaboration with national and international public authorities. PROMEHS will be implemented in six European Countries using the training study methodology. The research design includes the collection of pre- and post-test data among students and their teachers from kindergarten to secondary school. Comparison between the experimental group and the control group will be carried out in order to assess the impact of the PROMEHS curriculum. The findings and outcomes will then serve as the basis for national educational policies in the Member States on mental health promotion in school

Assessment and Promotion of Social, Emotional, and Health Skills in European Schools: The Learning to Be Project

The school, as an educational system, is increasingly asked to teach students social and emotional skills that may facilitate their social success and well-being, and teachers are also expected to evaluate these competencies. Both of these goals (teaching and assessment) are mentioned in the Recommendation of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union of 18 December 2006 on key competencies for lifelong learning (European Union, 2006), and reiterated in 2018 in the New Recommendations (European Union, 2018). Although school principals and teachers are aware of these new tasks, in many instances they are not provided with appropriate methods to assess the achievement of these non-cognitive skills. Indeed, students have traditionally been assessed at school only for their knowledge and academic performance. The Learning to Be project, an Erasmus+ Key Action 3 project co-funded by the European Commission in 2017, aims to address this issue by developing and testing a set of tools and methods that would help teachers, as well as their students, recognise and assess social, emotional, and health-related skills. Since Learning to Be is a Key Action 3 project, it consists of a policy experimentation that aims to evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of innovative policy measures through large scale field trials based on robust methodologies. The collected evidence is then used to facilitate the transnational transferability of the innovative measures (European Commission, 2017)

Emotion Knowledge, Theory of Mind, and Language in Young Children: Testing a Comprehensive Conceptual Model

Numerous studies suggest that both emotion knowledge and language abilities are powerfully related to young children’s theory of mind. Nonetheless, the magnitude and direction of the associations between language, emotion knowledge, and theory-of-mind performance in the first years of life are still debated. Hence, the aim of this study was to assess the direct effects of emotion knowledge and language on theory-of-mind scores in 2- and 3-year-old children. A sample of 139 children, aged between 24 and 47 months (M = 35.5 months; SD = 6.73), were directly administered measures of emotion knowledge, theory of mind, and language. We conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) to evaluate the effects of these variables within a single comprehensive framework, while also controlling for any effects of age and gender. The proposed structural equation model provided an excellent fit for the data, indicating that both children’s emotion knowledge, and their language ability had direct positive effects on theory of mind scores. In addition, age was found to wield statistically significant effects on all the variables under study, whereas gender was not significantly associated with any of them. These findings suggest the importance of fostering young children’s emotion knowledge and language ability with a view to enhancing their comprehension of mental states

The Italian version of the Empathy Questionnaire for 18-to 36-months-old children: psychometric properties and measurement invariance across gender of the EmQue-I13

Pathways through Adolescenc

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