2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Subjects and Study Procedures
During the study, the effectiveness of the ELLA training for the promotion of emotional and social competences in 3–6-year-old children was evaluated. The quasi-experimental study was carried out in seven preschool and pre-primary education institutions in four different counties of Lithuania in 2022 (Kaunas, Vilnius, Klaipėda district, and Marijampolė). In the institutions participating in the study, 1–2 groups of kindergarten children were randomly selected, from which the experimental group was formed, and another 1–2 other groups of kindergarten children were selected, from which the control group was formed. Parents of children who attended randomly selected kindergarten groups and met the inclusion criteria were informed about the study, invited to participate in the study, and asked to sign the informed consent form. The inclusion criterion for the children participating was that the child was 3–6 years old. There was also an intention to form experimental and control groups similar in terms of gender, age proportions, and the number of children in each group. The children’s teachers filled out questionnaires about the children, and socio-demographic data were collected from one of the parents.
The emotional and social competences of the children in the experimental and control groups were assessed twice. The first evaluation of the children was carried out before starting the ELLA training for the promotion of emotional and social competences, and the second was carried out after the completion of the training. The children of the experimental group participated in the modified ELLA training; based on the training methodology, separate groups of 3–4-year-old and 5–6-year-old children were formed, each consisting of 8–10 children [
35]. A total of eight groups were formed. The training was conducted by trained psychologists together with kindergarten teachers, who assisted them and also participated in special training. The children of the control group were not exposed to the training and had no contact with the children of the experimental group during the study. To evaluate the effectiveness of the training, information was obtained from different informants—psychologists who performed individual assessments of the children and teachers working with children in the kindergarten who filled out questionnaires, which allowed for controlling for possible methodological bias [
51]. The teachers were given a questionnaire using the EMK screening, and the psychologists performed an individual assessment of the children’s emotional and social competences using the EMK 3–6. Additionally, to avoid the bias effect, the intervention training for children was carried out and evaluated by different researchers.
The parents of the children of the experimental group were introduced to the main ideas and principles of the program and were encouraged to observe and reinforce the behavior of their children as they expressed their emotional and social competences. During the ELLA training, children’s emotional and social competences were developed with the help of various tasks twice a week for about 30–60 min a day. In total, eight sessions were completed in about 4–5 weeks. The Lithuanian version of the ELLA training was prepared for the study. The authors of the program, E. Amtmann and V. Kerbl, trained the researchers (psychologists and pedagogues) on how to conduct the training and provided supervision during its implementation in order to ensure the standardized conduction of educational programs.
In total, 143 children were selected for the experimental hroup or the control group. Of these, 66 (47.1%) were boys, and 74 (52.9%) were girls. There were 86 (61.4%) children aged 3–4 years and 54 (38.6%) children aged 5–6 years. A total of 89 children were selected for the experimental group, and 54 were assigned to the control group. For some reason, three children did not start attending the training and were excluded from further analysis. Thus, a total of 86 children (the experimental group) participated in the ELLA training.
2.2. Intervention Program
The dependent variables of the study were changes in children’s emotional and social competences before and after the ELLA training, and the independent variable of the study was the educational intervention program—the ELLA training for the promotion of emotional and social competences (germ. ELLA, ein Training zur Förderung der emotionalen und sozialen Kompetenz) [
35], intended for kindergarten teachers who want to carry out primary preventive work and provide assistance to children aged 3 to 6. The goal of the training is the development of emotional and social competences, based on C. Saarni’s concept of basic emotional competences [
37], the Affective Social Competences Model [
36], and the Pyramid Model [
5]. Four universal emotional competences fall within the domain of capacity building: awareness of emotions, understanding of emotions, empathy, emotional regulation, and basic social skills.
Ella the Giraffe hand puppet is used as the main character in the training, as well as other teaching material. The tasks are presented to children in an appealing way: a game that entails music, role playing, various discussions, stories for relaxation and exercises, storytelling, and group games.
During the study, a modified and Lithuanian-translated version of the training program was used. The training was carried out more intensively—twice a week instead of once a week; thus, it was compressed into 4–5 weeks. The training was conducted by two trained specialists—a psychologist and a kindergarten educator—instead of one teacher, as in the original version. The Lithuanian version of the program song was created and used. The modified program consisted of four stages (a total of eight sessions):
- (1)
Awareness and Expression of Emotions (three sessions): during the sessions, children talk with the specialists in the group about the basic emotions of anger, sadness, joy, fear, and boredom and/or interest and the ways in which they can be expressed. Children are encouraged to reflect on their feelings and state and express them accordingly, and they are taught to recognize and name the main emotions. Emotion cards are used during sessions.
- (2)
Understanding and Emotion Knowledge (three sessions): various types of expressions of emotions are discussed; children are taught to observe the expression of each other’s emotions during a play, to recognize them, and to imitate them. The individual expression of emotions and their causes and consequences are discussed. Emotions are expressed during play; emotion cards are used to facilitate the discussions.
- (3)
Empathy and Prosocial Behavior (one session): based on basic emotions and related personal experiences, children are encouraged to empathize with another person and share their experiences in the group. Thinking about what another person might need when he or she is upset, sad, or afraid can lead to empathy and prosocial behavior.
- (4)
Emotional Regulation (one session): real-life stories are discussed, based on visual aids, to show what happens in the human body when a person is angry. In a group discussion, various emotional regulation strategies are discussed and tested. The creative use of various emotional regulation techniques is encouraged, and hand puppets with different emotional expressions are used.
The theoretical background of the program, descriptions of the sessions, and the necessary teaching material are presented in the book of the program authors [
35].
2.3. Instrument and Variables
To evaluate the emotional and social competences of the children, we used the Inventory to Survey Emotional Competences for Three- to Six-Year-Olds (EMK 3–6) (germ. Inventar zur Erfassung emotionaler Kompetenzen bei Drei- bis Sechsjährigen, EMK 3–6) [
52]. The EMK 3–6 allows for a comprehensive evaluation of the emotional and social competences of children aged 3 to 6.5 years. The instrument consists of two parts: EMK screening and EMK 3–6. The instrument was translated from German into Lithuanian by the authors of the article.
EMK screening: This is a questionnaire consisting of three scales: Emotion Knowledge (four statements, scores 0–12), Empathy (eight statements, scores 0–24), and Self-Regulation (five statements, scores 0–15). Examples of statements are: The child expresses his or her feelings properly with his facial expressions; He or she praises other children when they do something good; If a child has to wait, he or she can do something on his or her own (e.g., play or sing). The internal consistency of the subscales in the individual subscales ranges from 0.90 to 0.94, as reported in the test manual. In the study sample, the Cronbach alpha indicators of the internal consistency of the scales were as follows: Emotion Knowledge scales, 0.64; Empathy scales, 0.92; and Self-Regulation scales, 0.77. During the study, the EMK screening questionnaire was filled out by the teachers.
EMK 3–6: In this study, we used three subscales that test the domains of Emotion Knowledge, Emotional Regulation, and Empathy: Primary Emotions (19 items), Secondary Emotions (14 items), and Prosocial Behavior (21 items). In the Primary Emotions and Secondary Emotions subscales, the tasks were aimed at recognizing and naming emotions, naming the facial expressions of emotions, and naming the causes of emotions as well as emotional regulation strategies. The subscale Prosocial Behavior includes such competences as the ability to spontaneously express prosocial behavior, recognize prosocial decisions, and justify them. Children’s competences are assessed by using a book of stimuli, wooden figures, and various tasks presented to the child. In the test manual, the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of individual EMK 3–6 subscales ranges from 0.78 to 0.90 [
52]. In this study, the following indicators of internal consistency were obtained: Primary Emotions, 0.79; Secondary Emotions, 0.72; and Prosocial Behavior, 0.89, which can be regarded as good.
2.4. Statistical Analysis
Descriptive, comparative, and relational analysis methods were applied in the statistical analysis of the data. Means, standard deviations, medians, and percentiles (quartiles and terciles) were calculated for the description of quantitative data. The correspondence of the distributions with the normal distribution was checked by applying the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. Frequencies were calculated for the description of categorical data.
The Chi-square test was used for the comparison of categorical variables between independent groups. Depending on the sample size, the exact (for small samples) and the asymptotic χ2 tests were used. The Mann–Whitney U test was used to compare quantitative variables between two independent groups. Changes in quantitative values were evaluated using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the ELLA training was performed by means of a comparison of the experimental and control groups. Comparative statistical methods allowed for the evaluation of the differences between groups and changes within groups. Differences and relationships were regarded as statistically significant when p < 0.05. IBM SPSS Statistics 27 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA) software was used for the statistical analysis.
2.5. Ethical Statement
The study was conducted with the permission of the Kaunas Regional Biomedical Research Ethics Committee No. BE-2-73.
4. Discussion
It is known that children’s language and executive functions develop most rapidly at the age of 3–6 years; thus, this is the most favorable time to develop their emotional and social competences [
47]. The development of these competences is so important that it could be included in educational programs alongside the development of other academic abilities [
53].
From the point of view of developmental psychology, the formation of emotional and social competences is affected by the implementation/presence of intervention programs and their nature, but other factors are also important, including the child’s age and gender [
54]. Researchers of emotional and social competence are well aware (and it has been empirically proven) that, in childhood, emotional and social skill scores in girls are higher than in boys [
55,
56]. One of the many possible explanations is that girls’ self-regulation skills, as a certain aspect of the executive function, are more developed [
57]. It has also been established that, as a child grows and his or her mental maturity increases, so do his or her emotional abilities—the understanding of emotions and emotional regulation [
58]. Some researchers claim that the recognition and naming of emotions improves from the age of 3 to 4–5 years, and this development slows down after the age of 5 [
59]. Due to the aforementioned irregularities, in our study, the data of the experimental group were compared with those of the control group to make both groups similar in various aspects before the intervention. Therefore, these factors (i.e., age and gender) were taken into account when forming the experimental and control groups. The analysis of the data showed that the differences in the gender and age of the children selected for the study were insignificant.
For a similar reason, we checked the equivalence of the groups in terms of emotional and social competences before the experiment and found that the results of the experimental group were better than those of the control group in the Primary Emotions and Prosocial Behavior subscales of the EMK 3–6. Thus, similar to the authors of the ELLA training, the authors of this study also had a problem of inconsistency of the primary data between the exposure and the control groups before the application of the educational program [
35,
60]. Poorer pre-exposure performance of the control group predicts stronger effects of the program for this group of subjects [
43]. On the other hand, based on the results of the EMK screening in the experimental and control groups before the experiment, no statistically significant differences were found between the groups. Thus, in summary, it can be said that the starting positions of both the experimental and control group subjects were quite similar overall.
It is important to mention that the assessment of children’s emotional and social competences was based on information obtained from two different sources—a questionnaire survey of teachers based on the EMK screening and an individual examination of the children conducted by psychologists using the EMK 3–6. This ensured greater objectivity of the data. It has been established that cross-informants (in this case, teachers) are especially important in the psychological assessment of a child because the momentary assessment of a child often depends on the context [
61], and, when assessing children’s emotional and social competences, the compatibility of the informants often ranges from low to moderate [
62]. Therefore, ensuring the presence of several sources of information in child assessment has become the “gold standard” [
61].
During the evaluation of the effectiveness of the ELLA training from the teachers’ point of view, the EMK screening data showed that, in the experimental group, a statistically significant increase in the score was only observed in the Self-Regulation subscale, while no changes were detected in the control group. A quasi-experimental study by J. Mihic and her colleagues also proved that competence development improves children’s self-regulation [
63]. Similar results were obtained by many other researchers [
64,
65]. A slight trend of change was also observed in the Emotion Knowledge subscale. Changes in Emotion Knowledge after interventions have been recorded by other researchers as well [
40,
66,
67]. When evaluating the results of the EMK screening according to the number of the training sessions attended, in the experimental group of children who attended more sessions (6–8), an increase in the score was found in the Emotion Knowledge subscale, and a slight increasing trend was observed in the Self-Regulation subscale. There were no statistically significant changes in the groups of children who attended fewer than six sessions. The comparison of the results of this study with those obtained by the authors of the ELLA training program by testing the effectiveness of the program in Austria in 2017–2018 showed that large differences in Emotion Knowledge, Empathy, and Self-Regulation can be seen in different groups. In these areas, teachers rated the children of the experimental group much better than they rated the children of the control group [
35].
The assessment of the changes in the children’s evaluation results obtained with the help of the EMK 3–6 after the educational training showed that, in the experimental group, the indicators of the Primary Emotions, Secondary Emotions, and Prosocial Behavior subscales increased—not by much, but statistically significantly. That the effects of emotional and social competence training programs are not large is a relatively common finding [
23]. In addition, it should be noted that the educational program was relatively short, i.e., 4–5 weeks, while, in order to form stable and long-term skills, months or even years of training are needed [
68]. It is also logical that, as the scores of the Primary and Secondary Emotions increased, the Prosocial Behavior indicators increased as well: it is natural that, when children’s emotional abilities improve, their interpersonal behavior becomes more effective, and the number of the forms of prosocial behavior increases [
69].
The comparison of the results according to the number of sessions attended showed that the indicators of emotional competence increased statistically significantly both in children who attended one to five sessions and in those who attended six to eight sessions. It should be noted that, in general, the opinions of researchers regarding how long emotional and social competence-promoting programs should be carried out for in order to achieve an effect differ: for example, according to Moore and his colleagues, the effect of the program is stronger if the duration of the program is longer [
70], but other researchers believe that it is not the duration of the intervention that has a greater impact on emotional and social competences but rather the content of the program and its professional application [
71].
In summary, it can be noted that the results of the ELLA training obtained with the help of the EMK 3–6 were significantly better than those obtained via the EMK screening. This may mean that teachers did not assess the changes in children’s emotional and social competences objectively enough, which indicates the need to use several sources of information in this kind of research, such as a detailed psychological examination of the child, and the involvement of parents in the evaluation of changes in emotional and social competences could also be significant.
It can be assumed that this training will be effective not only for Lithuanian and Austrian children but also in other contexts of Western cultures.
It is still a matter of discussion how national or ethnical backgrounds can influence the possibilities of programs that develop emotional and social competences [
72]. It is thought, however, that cultural relativity would influence the attitudes towards emotional-social competencies: the importance of some emotional competencies is stressed more, while the importance of others is downplayed due values that exist in society. In order to integrate ELLA practices in cultures different from Western cultures, i.e., more collectivist societies, it should be revised according to a specific culture’s needs. Despite that, it would be useful to look into the efficacy of the program in such cultures.
To date, the effectiveness of the training has not been tested in samples of children with neurodevelopmental problems such as autism. However, considering the developmental perspective, developmentally delayed children could also benefit from the ELLA training. Any kind of developmental delay usually entails a lack of social-emotional skills. Children with the autism spectrum disorder have difficulties getting involved in social relationships and regulating emotions. It can be assumed that certain content could (and should) be adapted for autistic children considering the severity of symptoms and the functional level of the child according to the ICD-11 criteria [
73].
The evidence-based ELLA training is very necessary for Lithuanian preschool education, as it will allow teachers to reliably develop the emotional and social abilities of children.
Strengths and Limitations
Several strengths of the study are worth mentioning. One of the strengths is that the assessment of children’s emotional and social competences was based on several sources of information, i.e., a questionnaire survey of the teachers as well as an individual evaluation of the children’s competences by psychologists using the EMF 3–6. When the children were presented with various tasks that they had to solve, they had to answer the questions presented and evaluate the situations. The inclusion of several informants increased the objectivity of the research data. Another strength of the study was that the researchers were trained in the application of the training program and evaluation instruments and also received consultations along the way, which allowed for a high-quality implementation of the training program and application of the evaluation instruments. The researchers received supervision from the authors of the training program, and consultations on the use of the evaluation instruments were received from a researcher with many years of experience. Another strength of the study is that the research has become an empirical basis for the development of emotional and social competences in preschool children.
The study also had several limitations.
First, only the short-term effects of the training program on children’s emotional and social competences were evaluated, assessing changes in competences immediately after the completion of the training. It is well known that the consolidation of emotional and social competences in young children requires a longer duration of the intervention [
47].
Second, the study and the training program took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which complicated the conditions for conducting the study and the training program, making it more difficult to organize the study and the program. The pandemic put stress on researchers, and the risk of lower child attendance increased.
In future research, it would be important to carry out the training program for a longer period of time, with sessions held once a week, and also to evaluate the long-term effects of the program by performing a repeated measurement several months after the completion of the program. In addition, the study showed the importance of using several sources of information in the evaluation of children’s emotional and social competences, not limiting the evaluation to questionnaire surveys of adults but also applying a detailed examination of children’s competences.
Future studies may be directed towards the application of ELLA practices and the application towards children with special needs. It is important to find out how the development of emotional and social competencies may affect a child’s other capabilities such as attention. We hope that by developing the knowledge, understanding, and expression of emotions, attention is also developed, as children are taught to concentrate on, observe, and hear what they are being told by others. Moreover, it is important to analyze the expedience of the participation of parents in the realization of the program and the influence that socio-demographic factors may have on the results of children’s emotional competencies.