Emotional skills to navigate between stress and vitality in the face of turbulence at school: A correlational study among secondary school students

Abstract

Emotional skills (Mikolajczak et al., 2014, 2020) include recognizing and understanding one's own emotions and those of others, expressing one's own emotions and facilitating the expression of others' emotions, regulating one's own emotions and helping others to do so, and finally using one's own emotions and those of others. Developing these emotional skills in children and adolescents is part of the recommendations of the Romand Plan of Study (PER), the World Health Organization (Ambord et al., 2018) and the Swiss Committee for Health Promotion (Amstad et al., 2022). For example, in the transversal skills of the PER, creative thinking includes 'identifying and expressing one's emotions', '...managing emotions...', while collaboration and communication skills aim to 'welcome others with their characteristics', 'identify perceptions, feelings and intentions', and 'adapt communication based on the recipient's reactions'.

Emotional skills are crucial for preventing and managing the harmful effects of high levels of stress, which affect the academic success, well-being and social relationships of 32.6% of young people in Switzerland (Albrecht et al., 2021). However, the specific importance of each of these different skills for the optimal functioning of students remains to be explored.

In this context, our contribution aims to better understand the relationships between different emotional skills and stress among secondary 2 students (mean age = 18.22, sd = 2.03) in French-speaking Switzerland. To this end, 416 students (245 boys) completed the short versions of the Short Profile of Emotional Competence (S-PEC) (Mikolajczak et al., 2014) and the Perceived Stress Scale (Lesage et al., 2012), as well as a school adaptation of Shirom and Melamed's Vigor Measure (Isoard-Gautheur et al., 2020), which assesses physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness.

The results suggest that higher levels of stress correlate in particular with poorer intrapersonal skills (especially regulation and expression of one's own emotions) and that vigor scores, especially emotional energy, correlate with better interpersonal emotional skills (especially regulation and listening to others' emotions).

The cross-sectional nature of this research precludes any causal interpretation. Furthermore, these results should be treated with caution, given the scales used, which are still being validated in adolescents. Nevertheless, these initial data suggest that stress management and various facets of school resilience are not achieved solely through regulation of one's own emotions, and that other emotional skills (such as identifying, understanding and expressing emotions) could be cultivated to help students feel better.