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© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)., There is compelling evidence that early school intervention programs enhance children's development of life skills, with a positive knock-on effect on their behaviors and academic outcomes. To date, most universal interventions have displayed gains in children's social-emotional competencies with a limited reduction in problem behaviors. This may depend on programs' curricula focused to a greater extent on preschoolers' social-emotional competencies rather than problem behaviors. Promoting Mental Health at Schools (PROMEHS) is a European, school-based, universal mental health program explicitly focused on both promoting students' mental health and preventing negative conduct by adopting a whole-school approach. In this study, we set out to evaluate the effectiveness of the program for Italian and Portuguese preschoolers. We recruited 784 children (age range = 4-5 years), assigning them to either an experimental group (six months' participation in the PROMEHS program under the guidance of their teachers, who had received ad hoc training) or a waiting list group (no intervention). We found that PROMEHS improved preschoolers' social-emotional learning (SEL) competencies, prosocial behavior, and academic outcomes. The more practical activities were carried out at school, the more children's SEL competencies increased, and the more their internalizing and externalizing behaviors decreased. Furthermore, marginalized and disadvantaged children were those who benefited most from the program, displaying both greater improvements in SEL and more marked decreases in internalizing problems compared to the rest of the sample., This research project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Erasmus+ KA3 research project “Promehs-Promoting Mental Health at Schools” (No. 606689-EPP-1-2018-2-IT-EPPKA3-PI-POLICY). The study was coordinated by the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and involved eight other European partners: The University of Latvia (Latvia), the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the University of Malta (Malta), the University of Patras (Greece), the City of Rijeka (Croatia), the University of Rijeka (Croatia), Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava (Romania), and the Regional School Office of Suceava (Romania). This publication was funded by two grants from the University of Milano-Bicocca (2021-ATE-0265 and 2019-ATE-0001) awarded to I.G. and V.O., respectively.

Svrha ovog priručnika je senzibiliziranje ravnatelja odgojno-obrazovnih institucija i nositelja obrazovnih politika u našoj zemlji na važnost mentalnoga zdravlja djece i učenika, posebice u kontekstu odgoja i obrazovanja, te uloge dječjih vrtića, osnovnih i srednjih škola. Sadržajno obuhvaća suvremene teorijske spoznaje te praktične implikacije za odgojno- obrazovni kontekst u okviru osnaživanja mentalnoga zdravlja djece, učenika i odgojno- obrazovnih djelatnika. Pritom, također obuhvaća tri važna područja: područje socijalno- emocionalnih kompetencija, otpornosti i mentalnoga zdravlja.

Objectives: The consequences of long-lasting restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic have become a topical question in the latest research. The present study aims to analyze longitudinal changes in adolescents’ social emotional skills, resilience, and behavioral problems. Moreover, the study addresses the impact of adolescents’ social emotional learning on changes in their resilience and behavioral problems over the course of seven months of the pandemic., Methods: The Time 1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2) measuring points were in October 2020 and May 2021, characterized by high mortality rates and strict restrictions in Europe. For all three countries combined, 512 questionnaires were answered by both adolescents (aged 11-13 and 14-16 years) and their parents. The SSIS-SEL and SDQ student self-report and parent forms were used to evaluate adolescents’ social emotional skills and behavioral problems. The CD-RISC-10 scale was administered to adolescents to measure their self-reported resilience. Several multilevel models were fitted to investigate the changes in adolescents’ social emotional skills, resilience, and behavioral problems, controlling for age and gender. Correlation analysis was carried out to investigate how changes in the adolescents’ social emotional skills were associated with changes in their resilience and mental health adjustment., Results: Comparing T1 and T2 evaluations, adolescents claim they have more behavioral problems, have less social emotional skills, and are less prosocial than perceived by their parents, and this result applies across all countries and age groups. Both informants agree that COVID-19 had a negative impact, reporting an increment in the mean internalizing and externalizing difficulties scores and reductions in social emotional skills, prosocial behavior, and resilience scores. However, these changes are not very conspicuous, and most of them are not significant. Correlation analysis shows that changes in adolescents’ social emotional skills are negatively and significantly related to changes in internalized and externalized problems and positively and significantly related to changes in prosocial behavior and resilience. This implies that adolescents who experienced larger development in social emotional learning also experienced more increase in resilience and prosocial behavior and a decrease in difficulties., Conclusion: Due to its longitudinal design, sample size, and multi-informant approach, this study adds to a deeper understanding of the pandemic’s consequences on adolescents’ mental health., peer-reviewed

During toddlerhood responses to others’ distress transform from an overwhelming personal distress reaction to a more other oriented empathic reaction that gives rise to precocious prosocial behaviors (Zahn-Waxler et al., 1992). There also appears to be a transformation from concern for the self to a capability for concern for the other, along with the development of self-other differentiation, perspective taking, and emotion regulation (Knafo et al., 2008). This study aimed to deepen the relation between toddlers’ empathic behavior and both internal and social factors, such as emotion regulation, language ability, emotion knowledge and maternal emotion style, all found to play a crucial role in the development of positive social skills in early childhood (Denham, 2007). Participants were 335 toddlers (156 girls), with a mean age of 28.79 months (SD = 3.55; range: 20-36). They came from middle-class families and were recruited in 34 nursery schools in the north of Italy. Their mothers were asked to fill in a battery of questionnaires assessing their children’s empathic-prosocial behavior, emotion regulation, language ability, and their own emotional style. All the children were tested for their emotion knowledge through the Affective Knowledge Task (Denham, 2006). Results showed significant correlations between toddlers’ empathic and prosocial behavior and their emotion regulation (r=.40; p