Abstract Pons

The way that children and adolescents understand the nature, causes, regulation and effects of emotions has emerged as a key predictor of their mental health (MH) and school achievement (SA). Because of its multiple positive impacts, emotion understanding (EU) has lately become the target of intervention programs. However, most of these programs try to improve only a few basic components of EU, target mainly children, are time-consuming, and resource-dependent. They are often conducted outside the classroom on an individual basis by third parties with high expertise, or do not actually evaluate their impact on MH and SA. We currently lack a comprehensive, low-cost and brief school-based program to improve emotion understanding both in typical and at risk children and adolescents.