Children writing on anger. An instrument for the promotion of an effective emotion management? Symposium “The development of emotional competence: correlational and training studies”

It is well known that an effective emotion management can have strong implications in the development of adaptive behaviours especially during childhood and adolescence and with particular reference to anger-related emotions. The present study has two main goals: on one hand we wanted to test the hypothesis that stimulating the use of narrative applied to episodes of anger that had been experienced by children in their everyday life can elicit adaptive ways of coping with negative feelings; on the other hand we intended to show the relationship between an effective anger-related emotion management and the children’s social functioning in the peer group. Method. Our sample included 96 children (M=46; F=50) aged 8 to 11. The experimental subjects were 42 children who attended a school training on anger management through the writing of an event-based semi-structured diary and a subsequent discussion in the class. We also administered to the whole sample an interview designed to assess coping strategies, emotion regulation and the expectancies about the possibility to solve the stressful situation: children were asked to answer questions about four stories based on realistic situations set in two different kinds of social contexts (peer group, adults). Results. The preliminary analysis we performed on our data, showed that experimental subjects seemed to interpret the consequences of stressful situations on a level which appeared to be more abstract and less connected to individual factors than the one controls referred to. The variable “social context” seemed to influence the children’s coping strategies, the latter acting as mediators of the subjects’ social functioning. Further analyses must be performed in order to confirm these first results. Conclusions. The use of diary writing seems to represent a promising tool to promote the development of emotional and socio-cognitive skills in school children.