Facilitating Emotional Self-Regulation in Preschool Children: Efficacy of the Early HeartSmarts Program in Promoting Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development

Abstract

Abstract:Developed by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program is designed to train teachers to guide and support young children (3-6 years old) in learning emotional self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies, with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social and cognitive development. This work reports the results of an evaluation study conducted to assess the efficacy of the EHS program in a pilot implementation carried out during the 2006-2007 academic year in schools of the Salt Lake City School District. The study was conducted using a quasiexperimental longitudinal field research design with three measurement moments (baseline and pre-and post-intervention panels) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA) instrument, a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring student growth in four areas of developmentsocial/emotional, physical, cognitive and language development. Children in nineteen preschool classrooms were divided into intervention and control group samples (N = 66 and 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 years), in which classes in the former were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority family backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and also in each of the four development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of ANCOVAs found a strong, consistent pattern of significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group who did not.Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely learning, attention, memory, decision making and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion … .

Emotion Self-Regulation, Psychophysiological Coherence, and Test Anxiety: Results from an Experiment Using Electrophysiological Measures

“…Other research supports the efficacy of this approach in educational settings, where HeartMath programs have improved emotional stability, psychosocial functioning, learning, and academic performance in students at different grade levels (Arguelles et al 2003;Bradley et al 2007Bradley et al , 2009Hartnett-Edwards 2008;McCraty 2005;McCraty et al 1999). Of direct relevance to the present study is a controlled laboratory experiment with middle school students using electrophysiological measures of HRV.…”

“…Given that the program's core intervention utilizes a set of positive emotion-based selfregulation techniques that engage the whole psychophysiological system, this study's findings challenge many of the most basic assumptions underlying the current educational model, which focuses almost exclusively on cognitive processes (Elias and Arnold 2006;Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007;Salovey and Sluyter 1997). Moreover, if similar programs were integrated into our educational system even earlier in our children's education and maintained throughout the educational trajectory (e.g., Bradley et al 2009;McCraty et al 1999), the accumulated benefits in self-regulatory strength and effort-improved physiological health, socioemotional competence, learning, and academic performance-would be expected to improve student educational experience and achievement, and thus enhance their readiness to assume their adult roles and responsibilities in society (Salovey and Sluyter 1997). Thus, it is our hope that the promising results of this study will help open the door to a new area of scientific inquiryone concerning how we can best leverage the fundamental interconnections among physiological, emotional, cognitive, and social processes to create optimal educational environments in which all students will flourish.…”

Promoting self-regulated learning in preschoolers

“…In general, intervention studies for preschoolers in the context of self-regulation differ concerning a) the measurement of intervention success, either measuring benefits only at the child-level (Schmitt, McClelland, Tominey, & Acock, 2015) or via external ratings (Dörr & Perels, 2019a); b) the type of fostering through direct interventions at the child level (Barnett et al, 2008;Schmitt et al, 2015) or through indirect interventions which focus on the promotion of potential multipliers, such as kindergarten teachers (see also next section; Bradley, Atkinson, Tomasino, Rees & Galvin, 2009;Ford, McDougall, & Evans, 2009;Venitz & Perels, 2019); and c) the general stimulation of self-regulation (Raver et al, 2011), compared to specific self-regulation strategies/aspects such as self-reflection (Espinet, Anderson, & Zelazo, 2013;Flook, Goldberg, Pinger, & Davidson, 2015) or metacognition (Dörr & Perels, 2019a). However, most of the literature in this age group has tapped into gSR, and less so on SRL (e.g.…”

Efficacy of an Emotion self-regulation Program for Promoting Development in Preschool Children

“…Using the whole sample, we conducted an item analysis and a validity and reliability of measurement analysis of the TCCA instrumentation-development scales, subcomponents, and individual items (results available in Bradley et al, 2009). 59 Starting with the item analysis, the range of the point-biserial order correlation (pbs r) over the 50 items across the 3 measurement moments was 0.26 to 0.82.…”