Dear Colleagues,

The WHO predicted that by 2025, a quarter of the population would be concerned by mental health issues such as depression and anxiety disorders, and has thus encouraged the promotion of psychosocial competences in children and adolescents in order to promote greater physical, mental and social health. This has led to the development of a number of programs aimed at increasing psychosocial competences. Social and emotional learning has even been included in many countries’ school curricula. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the identification and development of protection factors in children and adolescents has become even more crucial, and the role of referring adults such as parents, teachers and social workers in promoting developmental assets and resilience has become more evident. Although social and emotional learning research has indicated numerous benefits of psychosocial competences development programs on physical, mental and social health (see meta-analyses by Durlak et al., 2011; Sklad et al., 2012; Taylor et al., 2017; Wiglesworth et al., 2016), more research is needed to identify the mechanisms of action of these programs. This means identifying the most effective components of interventions and analyzing the role of each psychosocial competence, developmental asset or strength, in order to tailor programs adapted to each age-group according to the targeted protection factor. Furthermore, research is needed to analyze more precisely the importance of the parents’ and professionals’ psychosocial competences in determining the development of children and teenagers’ mental health protection factors. The aim of this Special Issue is threefold: (1) identifying promising new ways of increasing health promotion factors in order to disseminate evidence-based interventions to promote children and adolescents’ health; (2) analyzing mediator and moderator factors, and transferability characteristics, in order to increase the efficacy of health promotion interventions; (3) developing validated tools that enable measuring psychosocial competences, developmental assets and other useful mental health protection and resilience factors in children and adolescents to advance evidence-based research and practice in this field.

Prof. Dr. Rebecca Shankland
Dr. Béatrice Lamboy
Dr. François Beck
Guest Editors

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• social and emotional learning
• psychosocial competences
• evidence-based interventions
• developmental assets
• strengths-based interventions
• resilience
• protection factors
• relationship quality
• positive education
• positive parenting