Emotional competence in elementary years: Expressing, understanding, and regulating emotions

Considering the pervasiveness of achievement emotions in school, research recently focused on them and documented differences between contexts in terms of subject-matters or settings. However, to our knowledge few studies have involved elementary school students on the prevalence of achievement emotions and their relationship with other components of emotional competence, in terms of ability to express, understand and regulate one’s own and others’ emotions. The present study focused on the development of emotional competence across elementary school years, taking into account students and their significant adults like teachers and parents. Participants were 166 Italian first, third, and fifth graders, their parents, and their Italian and mathematics teachers. They were administered three instruments to measure expression of achievement emotions (a questionnaire adapted from Pekrun, Goetz, Frenzel, Barchfeld, & Perry, 2011), emotion understanding (TEC, Test of Emotion Comprehension, Pons & Harris, 2000), and emotion regulation (ERC, Emotion Regulation Checklist, Shields & Cicchetti, 2001). Decreases in children’s expression of positive achievement emotions and increases in children’s understanding and regulation of emotions across elementary years were found. Differences between settings and subjects emerged and higher similarity was found between children’s and parents’ emotional evaluations than between children’s and teachers’. Strong relationships between the three different components of emotional competence were found. These data, together with the prevalence of positive valence, should encourage devising interventions which, taking into account specificity of different contexts at different school levels, can detect students’ emotional constructs to promote their subjective wellbeing