Emotional Education Program for the Promotion and Prevention of Mental Health in 2nd, 3rd and 4th Grade Primary School Students (ULERTUZ)

The implementation of emotional education in educational centers is increasingly necessary for the promotion of a complete state of physical, mental and social well-being in children throughout the entire educational stage, and especially in early stages of development.

The present work aims at a double verification. On the one hand, it is intended to test the effectiveness of a structured program of emotional education in second, third and fourth grade of primary education and, on the other hand, to test the differential effect of this program in relation to an incidental tutorial action based on the ordinary school curriculum. A randomized controlled trial is proposed in Lauro Ikastola with three experimental groups (second, third and fourth year of primary education) and three active control groups (one for each of the three courses) with pretest and posttest and with the duration of a school year.

The general objective of the proposal is the promotion of the emotional well-being of children in a particularly turbulent stage of the school cycle (2nd, 3rd and 4th grades of Primary Education) and the prevention of behavioral and/or emotional problems that may arise in later stages. The specific objectives to be achieved through the intervention in the priority population are the improvement in the following aspects: 1) Emotional intelligence; 2) Self-concept; 3) Socialization; 4) Emotional problems (depression and anxiety); 5) Behavioral problems (anger control, behavioral problems and impulsivity); and 6) Contextual problems (problems among peers). Additionally, the following two objectives are set as indirect results of the intervention in the agents involved: 5) to improve the emotional development of the parents whose children participate in the program; 6) to improve the emotional development of the tutors in charge of implementing the program.

The total sample is made up of 157 primary school students from Lauro Ikastola HLBHIP, a private school for infant, primary, secondary and high school education (municipality of Lujua, Vizcaya). From each of the three grades for which the program is intended (2nd, 3rd and 4th), two classes per grade will be selected by accessibility, which will be randomly assigned to the control group (CG) or the experimental group (GE). The emotional education program (ULERTUZ) will be applied to the experimental group and the control group will follow the academic curriculum provided by each school for each school year. The main measurement instruments will be the Adult Emotional Development Questionnaire (CDE-A), the Bar-On Emotional Intelligence Inventory EQ-I:YV, the Socialization Battery (BAS 1-2), the System for the Assessment of Children and Adolescents (SENA) and the Beck Inventory for Children and Adolescents-2 (BYI-2).