Promoting Children’s Emotional Health and Psychological Development: Assessment, Narrative Methods, and Relational Interventions

Dear Colleagues,

Children’s emotional health and psychological development are shaped by a complex interplay of individual, relational, educational, family, and health-related factors. Throughout childhood, emotional functioning is closely connected to school well-being, social relationships, parent–child interaction, psychological adjustment, and the child’s ability to express and organize emotional experience within meaningful relational and social environments. At the same time, children may encounter different forms of vulnerability, including school-related distress, emotional and behavioral difficulties, chronic illness, pain, neurological conditions, hospitalization, or other pediatric health conditions that may influence their developmental trajectories.

This Special Issue aims to gather theoretical, empirical, methodological, and intervention-based contributions addressing children’s emotional health and psychological development across educational, family, community, pediatric, and clinical contexts. Particular attention will be given to studies that assess, explore, or promote children’s emotional functioning through standardized, narrative, visual, relational, and psychodynamic-informed approaches. The Special Issue seeks to encourage dialogue between quantitative assessment, developmentally sensitive methods, and contextually grounded interventions, with the aim of advancing research on how children express, symbolize, narrate, and transform emotional experience within meaningful relationships and everyday environments.

Cutting-edge research in this area is increasingly moving toward integrated and developmentally sensitive models of children’s emotional health. Recent advances highlight the importance of studying children’s emotional functioning not only through symptom-focused or individual measures, but also through the ways in which children represent, communicate, and share their emotional experience within significant relationships and everyday contexts. Emerging lines of research include innovative methods for assessing school well-being and psychological adjustment; narrative and drawing-based approaches to children’s emotional experience; parent–child narrative practices; the use of visual and photographic materials; and mediating objects as tools to support emotional expression, symbolization, relational exchange, and the development of emotional competencies.

We welcome original research articles, reviews, systematic reviews, methodological papers, observational studies, and intervention studies addressing children’s emotional health and psychological development on clinical contexts.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Marco Piombo
Dr. Sabina La Grutta
Dr. Maria Stella Epifanio
Guest Editors

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