Jeux de société et compétences émotionnelles chez les enfants de 8 à 12 ans

Emotion recognition and differentiation have a great impact at school on social and academic outcomes. Several social-emotional learning programs have proven efficient to train social and emotional competences. Board games might constitute useful active learning tools to complement such programs. However, few existing games combine scientific background with convincing game mechanics. This project consisted in the development and evaluation of board games training emotional competences for 8 to 12-year-old children. A feasibility study compared these games to similar commercial games in terms of elicited emotion awareness. Relationships between emotion recognition, differentiation, and game experience were explored. Overall, experimental and control games did not differ in their stimulated emotion awareness. Game experience (difficulty and effort) was predicted by emotional competences for the emotional games, but not for the control games. This study, although preliminary, points to the games' potential to target emotion recognition and differentiation