Promoting emotion regulation competences and positive emotions in adolescents

Our current project seeks to provide a new psycho-educational tool to improve emotion regulation skills and to increase the expression of positive emotions in adolescents with or without neurodevelopmental disorders.

Adolescence is a challenging developmental stage during which psychological and biological changes contribute to the use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, to increased levels of negative emotions, and to the likelihood of developing emotion-related disorders. The field of emotion regulation in adolescence is still nascent and the current interventional programs focused on this specific topic are largely designed for children. Therefore, our first aim is to develop and to implement an intervention that particularly trains the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies and the expression of positive emotions in adolescents. Our second aim is to use this tool to improve adolescents’ emotional skills in order to facilitate their transition from school to professional life and to support resilience and positive social functioning. The intervention will use an interactive and multi-method setting (board games, apps) and will be tailored to adolescents’ interests and needs.