Emotional competences and well-being: Which facets of emotional awareness are linked to various forms of anxiety in 10-13 years old children?

Abstract

Emotions characterize most part of our daily lives. How individuals experience and deal with their emotions can be considered a key factor for various aspects of our mental health and well-being. Emotional awareness – a core element of emotional competence in children – refers to “individual differences in the way people differentiate, express, analyze, and pay attention to their own and others’ emotions” (Lahaye et al., 2011, p. 418). Interestingly, most of the studies addressing emotional awareness and anxiety, did not take into account that both concepts can be considered as multi-facetted phenomena. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine the associations between different facets of emotional awareness.

Results indicated that Verbal sharing of emotions seems to one of the key emotional competences that is linked to lower levels of multiple symptoms related to anxiety: in multiple regression analyses, this subscale of the EAQ predicted all facets of the MASC as well as avoidance of aversive situations related to school (Harm avoidance of the SRAS). This highlights the importance of expressing emotions and suggests that supporting children to learn how to share their emotions may lead to lower levels of many anxiety symptoms.