Emotional Education in the Formation of Adolescents: An Exploratory Research Study

This article is the result of exploratory research on the partial implementation of the Emotional Education Program for Preventing Violence (PEEPV, in Spanish) in two schools of different socioeconomic profiles, in the city of Recife, Brazil. PEEPV was designed with a view to improving the integrality of the formation of adolescents enrolled in compulsory regular education in Spain. Based on the experience of this Program in its home country, it was assumed that PEEPV could likewise contribute to the integral formation of adolescents in compulsory regular education in Brazil. In each school, a control group and an intervention group were set up, the performance of both of which was measured by using a five-point, 40-item Likert scale, with subscales designed to assess the following concepts of emotional development: self-knowledge, self-control, self-motivation, empathy and social skills. 643 questionnaires were applied. The T-type test of Means was used with independent samples, which refer to the moments before and after the intervention. The results showed no evidence that there had been any emotional-relational development regarding the above concepts. Despite these results, they show that there is a significant difference between the two schools that are of different socioeconomic strata, which raises the need for further research on the relationship between the concepts of habitus and cultural capital of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the skills that Emotional Education seeks to develop.