When is it appropriate to start a conversation, how do you set boundaries, or how do you ask for help? Social and emotional skills, such as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and correctly interpreting signals, are crucial for these kinds of everyday social tasks. When we are successful in this, it contributes to our relationships with others and our well-being. However, a lack of social-emotional skills can lead to all kinds of problems in behavior and relationships, in children and, in the long term, in adults as well.
To strengthen social-emotional skills at an early age, many training programs and intervention programs for children have come onto the market in recent decades. In general, these do appear to be effective, “but,” says educational psychologist Brechtje de Mooij, “they vary greatly in composition and impact. Most interventions draw from the same list of ingredients to create an intervention cocktail, and research to date has primarily focused on the effect of that ‘cocktail’ as a whole.”
De Mooij therefore investigated the effectiveness of the individual components of interventions and how they improve children’s social-emotional skills. “Interventions appear to be more effective when they contain components that are goal-oriented, such as reducing social anxiety, and when the target behavior is actually practiced, for example through exposure exercises. An adequate dosage of a specific component is crucial in this regard,” De Mooij concludes.
Research methods
First, De Mooij analyzed national and international literature to determine the extent to which specific components could be linked to the reported effects of interventions. She then examined these effects in greater depth using a number of experiments (microtrials). She focused on specific outcomes targeted by many interventions and relevant to school-age children, namely overcoming social and speech anxiety, building self-confidence, and promoting prosocial behavior.
Not all components are equally effective, and dosage matters
The microtrials show that exposure and cognitive restructuring (transforming unhelpful thoughts into helpful thoughts) are both effective individual components for reducing speech anxiety. De Mooij also found that cognitive restructuring appears to be effective in increasing children’s self-confidence and resilience, but that psychophysical exercises, such as learning to stand firmly, have no effect on these outcomes. This is interesting because psychophysical exercises are widely used in popular social skills training programs. Finally, social skills training programs that also emphasize children’s personal responsibility and teach them that they have a choice in how they want to behave (promoting autonomy) lead to a greater reduction in behavioral problems than programs in which only behavior is practiced.
The individual components are therefore not all equally effective, De Mooij found, but the effects also appear to be greatest when the dosage is optimal. De Mooij found this relationship in the literature analysis and in the three experiments. For psychoeducation (transferring knowledge about social processes or roles), this involves 3–6 exercises per intervention; for practicing interpersonal skills (skill-building), it involves 11–20 exercises.
More effective to target specific behavior in interventions
“All in all, the findings suggest that desired results can be achieved with relatively brief interventions and that the dosage at which a component is offered is crucial,” De Mooij concludes. “It may therefore not enhance the effectiveness of interventions to address multiple behavioral and cognitive aspects simultaneously with multiple intervention components. It appears to be more effective for interventions to target specific behavior with an adequate dosage of a specific intervention component. For example, it is advisable to always use psychoeducational exercises and behavioral exercises, focused both on interpersonal skills and on emotions and cognitions, accompanied by an emphasis on personal responsibility and autonomy.”
The dissertation ‘Opening the black box: Examining effective components of interventions for children’s social-emotional development.’ was made possible by ZonMw. The research in this dissertation is part of the Effective Work in the Youth Sector research program.