Abstract:

Why is it important to address the emotional health competences that our young students acquire? Currently the educational centres are considered environments that contribute to the integral development of individuals and not just places devoted to teaching contents and to the development of cognitive competences. In this sense, the improvement of emotional education is of great importance and therefore important efforts should be made to increase the competences involved in its development. The first step in order to acquire this goal is to detect the specific emotional health problems to be solved/faced through emotional competencies.

What have we done to approach this perception from young people? Students aged 12-18 were asked to select those emotional health problems they considered important from a list that had been previously made by a group of experts in the acquisition of competences. A self-administrated questionnaire was validated during a previous phase of a wider research project and then given to the students. The basic elements considered for the questionnaire were on one hand, its simplicity and the concretion and precision of the items included, and on the other, the discretion and preservation of anonymity of the information gathered. The first part of the questionnaire, which is the one that has been used in this research, is highly structured, including a series of questions related to the variables to be studied. In a relatively short period of time a great amount of information was gathered from 731 students coming from both public or concerted schools, located in urban or rural areas from five different regions of Spain in which the research was carried out.

What emotional health problems have students acquired throughout compulsory education? The problems selected to be included in the questionnaire were: stress, violence, harassment, maltreatment, hyperactivity, apathy, depression, emotional control/control of emotions, lack of empathy, social abilities, anxiety, etc. From all the items, young students considered more relevant depressions (32.4% in Valencia, 27.8% in Cuenca) and the bad management of emotions (30% in Teruel and 22.1% in Valencia). Significant differences were found in the results from rural and urban areas in relation to anxiety, being urban students those who considered anxiety a more relevant problem.

Keywords:

Emotional competence, health problems, schools.