Improving Emotion Recognition Ability to Support Social Development in Children: A Quasi-Experimental Study

The goal of this quasi-experimental study is to investigate whether enhancing emotion recognition abilities can improve social behavior in primary school children. The study focused on children aged approximately 6 to 9 years (both sexes), attending elementary school, without neurological or psychiatric diagnoses.

The main questions it aims to answer are:

Is there an inverse relationship between children's ability to recognize nonverbal emotional cues and antisocial behavior, as assessed by teachers?

Does nonverbal intelligence (measured through Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices) significantly predict emotion recognition ability (ERA)?

Researchers compared a group of children who received the intervention (experimental group) with a control group that did not, to see whether improvements in ERA relate to higher prosocial behavior and fewer behavioral difficulties.

Participants were asked to:

Complete the DANVA-2-RV, a standardized tool to assess nonverbal emotion recognition, updated and validated on the study sample;

Complete Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices, to measure nonverbal IQ;

Have their behavior assessed via the SDQ - Teacher Version, filled out by their classroom teachers.

A total of 140 children from four schools were enrolled. Participants were assigned non-randomly to an experimental or control group. Six teachers were involved in the behavioral assessments.

The study is concluded. Expected outcomes include:

A negative correlation between prosocial behavior and emotional confusion;

A weak or non-significant relationship between nonverbal intelligence and emotion recognition ability.