Lessons from School Psychology

Practical Strategies and Evidence-Based Practice for Professionals and Parents

Arlene Silva, Gayle Macklem, Arlene Silva, Gayle Macklem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351858779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapie

Lessons from School Psychology presents practical advice and evidence-based strategies for school-based professionals and parents to utilize when dealing with challenging and worrisome behavior in children and adolescents. Structured around a series of timely topics facing schools today, chapters cover everything from bullying and racial incidents to substance abuse and suicide prevention. This unique resource integrates proven models and strategies from school psychology practice in an accessible format that highlights key takeaways and valuable lessons for teachers, counselors, social workers, administration, or anyone looking to help a young person in their life.

Part I

Fostering Positive
Mental Health and
Social-Emotional
Development

1What Children Need to Understand About Emotions and How to Manage Them

Gayle Macklem

Emotional competency can be thought of as a set of skills that develop not only in childhood, but also throughout life (Lau & Wu, 2012). Emotionally competent children and adolescents tend to be well adjusted; they have friends and get along well with others. Emotionally competent students tend to pay attention in school and can negotiate this complex learning and social environment. All students need a developmentally appropriate level of emotional competency for mental health and for academic success.

Although there are many skills that need to be mastered in order to be emotionally competent, some skills are more basic and therefore more critical than others. Parents and teachers can facilitate the development and mastery of the most critical skills needed to accept, tolerate, and regulate emotions (Berking et al., 2008). Children need to be able to understand and label their own emotions and those of others. They need skills to tolerate and accept strong negative emotions in order to interpret what may have caused the way they are feeling, and to support themselves in upsetting situations. When children experience negative emotions too intensely, skills are needed to control and modify the emotion that caused the distress in order to problem solve. Although the skills that describe the ability to understand, accept, tolerate, modify, and regulate emotions may seem simple, they are actually a complex set of competencies that must be mastered to an adequate degree if children are going to function well.

Notes from the Field

Jackson

Jackson’s middle school teacher and his parents are worried about his behavior. He speaks out in class and is defensive when corrected. His teacher has tried to talk with him. She has treated him with kid gloves at times and alternatively has come down hard on him, which results in tearful anger. His teacher is at a loss to know what to try next.

Jamal

Jamal is an intense teenager. He is loud when things are going well and is both angry and loud when things are not going well. His teachers feel that he is easily triggered, and they interact with him cautiously. The assistant principal confronted him in the corridor between classes and demanded to know where he was going. When Jamal didn’t respond, the assistant principal raised his voice and stepped toward him. Jamal turned away and hit the wall with his fist. Now the principal has referred Jamal for a threat assessment.

Camila

Camila’s teacher complained to the school psychologist that this child does not often speak in class. No matter how much encouragement Camila is given to become involved in class, Camila remains shut down according to her teacher. She does not participate when children are working cooperatively, she never raises her hand to contribute to class, and when she is called on she doesn’t respond with any confidence. Camila frequently asks to go to the nurse’s office.

Lucas

Lucas is well known to his peers at recess. He frequently disagrees with other kids about the rules of the game and how things are going. He is disruptive in games if he does not do well. He will argue, yell, demand that things go his way, and if he strikes out in a baseball game, he totally disrupts the game. In class, he isn’t much better.

These students seem to be very different one from the other but they all are having difficulty regulating their emotions. This chapter will address emotional competency and emotional regulation primarily during elementary and middle school. If emotional competency is addressed during these school years, teachers and parents will help children avoid emotional delay and difficulties later on.

Why It Matters

There are strong associations between language competence and emotional competence. Children connect the labels for their feelings to their experiences. When asked to list as many emotion words as they can, elementary aged children do not tend to name very many different emotions (Beck, 2013). Although children can list a great many names for animals, they do not have the same proficiency listing emotion words (Beck, 2013, p. 89). Emotions are abstract, which may make them harder to learn. Knowing the words for emotions may depend on the extent to which families and teachers talk about emotions, and the extent to which children are read (or read) stories containing emotion words.

Emotions Have Names

Emotional literacy is the ability to express feelings using specific words. Children need to recognize the emotions they and others experience and know that these emotions have names. This important skill arms children with resiliency and gives them an important strategy to regulate emotions. The ability to use emotion words is one of the critical skills of emotional competency (Beck, Kumschick, Eid, & Klann-Delius, 2011). A child’s receptive vocabulary is closely related to emotion knowledge, the ability to recognize facial expressions, and awareness of more complex concepts such as mixed emotions. As children enter and progress through elementary and middle school, they experience significant growth in their emotional vocabulary. Putting feelings into words helps students regulate stressful experiences. Children who easily use emotion language are also more successful socially than their peers.

The simple act of labeling emotions causes emotions to decrease in intensity (Lieberman et al., 2007). When students at all ages are taught to label emotions correctly, it is much easier to teach them to deal with the negative emotions that drive their upset (Hannesdottir & Ollendick, 2007). When children are taught which emotions they are most likely to feel when they are going to be in particular environments or situations, they will be in a better position to use the emotion regulation strategies they know. This may protect them from being overcome with emotion and thereby unable to use the strategies they have learned.

There Are No “Bad” Emotions

Negative thinking in general is likely to result in feelings of sadness, anger, shame, guilt, fear, and anxiety (Hannesdottir & Ollendick, 2007). Sadness, fear, and withdrawal can predict anxiety and depressive symptoms (Clifford, Lemery-Chalfant, & Goldsmith, 2015). Positive emotions, such as happiness, help children think flexibly when they are faced with problems (Davis, 2016). However, children must be able to regulate both positive and negative emotions in order to be emotionally healthy (Djambazova-Popordanoska, 2016). Negative emotions are not “bad,” nor do they need to be avoided necessarily. At the same time, children need to know that emotions can be helpful, or they can cause trouble (Gross, 2015). Emotions can cause problems when they are expressed with the wrong intensity for the situation. They cause problems when they last too long, occur too often, or bias a student’s thinking and behavior.

Emotions Are Not Forever

Children need to understand that emotions are not permanent. Emotions may be intense, and come on quickly in reaction to stressful situations, people, and events, but they do not last forever. Emotions need to be accepted and tolerated. The fact that they are not permanent can encourage children and adolescents to learn to regulate them. Some children will benefit from being taught to react to physical signs of upset and use these as cues to use relaxation strategies (Hannesdottir & Ollendick, 2007). This is helpful in situations that are mildly upsetting. Regulation strategies help students get work done even though they may continue to feel somewhat stressed.

Some schools use a mindfulness strategy to help children develop emotion regulation. Mindfulness, or focusing on the immediate moment and letting one’s feelings flow without reacting, has promise for helping children regulate emotions. Practicing mindfulness skills reduces the intensity of emotions, letting individuals recover from an intense emotional experience quickly, and helping the student to think beyond himself/herself, and focus on goals (Roemer, Williston, & Rollins, 2015).

Mindfulness is a skill (Grecucci, Pappaianni, Siugzdaite, Theuninck, & Job, 2015). Unfortunately, the success of mindfulness for emotion regulation depends on practice. Individuals who practice mindfulness can regulate emotions by accepting their emotions and attending to the moment. Children or beginners in developing mindfulness skills may be more successful using a reappraisal strategy (changing the way they are thinking about what is stressing them). Students who have mastered mindfulness, or the ability to control their attention and awareness of their body sensitivities, may find mindfulness very useful.

Emotions Have Functions

Emotions occur quickly, and they trigger tendencies to behave in certain ways or not to act at all (Gross, 2015). Various emotions have specific triggers that result in specific behaviors (Clifford et al., 2015). When students experience specific emotions, they may wonder why they have to experience these emotions at all. Importantly, students need to know that emotions have specific jobs or functions. The function of sadness is to push students to withdraw and conserve energy when upset over a loss. Anger triggers children to act (Clifford et al., 2015). Fear’s function is to trigger avoidance, which may protect a child from harm. However, in other situations, fear can trigger aggression when a student is cornered and cannot avoid a threatening situation, event, or person. Fear can instigate escape as well (Pekrun, Hall, Goetz, & Perry, 2014). Anger, anxiety, and boredom can generate irrelevant thinking. Anxiety has a negative effect on complex tasks that require thinking and concentration, although it does not have much impact on easier tasks. Curiosity, joy, hope, pride, and interest are important emotions to foster. These emotions help children focus on tasks and consider what they might do in order to learn more.

Pekrun and colleagues (2014) found some emotions increase energy or activate behavior, while other emotions decrease or deactivate activity. In regard to positive emotions, enjoyment is activating and may help engage students in tasks. Pride is an example of an activating emotion most likely related to intrinsic motivation. In contrast, relaxation and contentment are deactivating emotions. In regard to negative emotions, anger and frustration tend to activate behavior along with anxiety, shame, and anger. Boredom, sadness, disappointment, and certainly hopelessness are deactivating emotions and will most likely reduce a student’s attention to learning. Negative emotions generally result in use of more rigid strategies to deal with emotions and lead to superficial processing of the information that a teacher is presenting.

We Can Learn to Control (i.e., Regulate) Emotions

Children with better regulation of their emotions tend to do better in school, have better social skills, and are less likely to experience mental health difficulties (Davis, 2016). We would like all children to understand that they can be in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and can learn to manage difficult emotions. Emotion regulation has to do with which emotions a child has, when the child has them, and how the child experiences or expresses these emotions (Gross, 2015). Children learn strategies by watching how their parents and teachers manage emotions, and they also learn from siblings and peers (Davis & Levine, 2013). Children may prefer to use some strategies more than they like to use other strategies, depending on their temperament or on physiological differences. Some children, for example, see the ‘downside’ of situations when they are stressed and tend to think negatively. This temperament is known as negative emotionality. Students with this temperament can lose control and exhibit misbehavior more readily than their classmates (Clifford et al., 2015)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Fostering Positive Mental Health and Social-Emotional Development
• Part II Supporting Academic Progress and Positive Behavior
• Part III Proactive, Systemic Strategies in Schools
• Index