Conference Agenda

Over the last few years, many schools have begun to place value on emotional well-being. This has involved the implementation of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) actions. This has impacted positively on the health and well-being of individuals and the educational community.

The main objective of emotional education, as Bisquerra (2003) indicates, focuses on the development of emotional competences and the search for personal and social well-being. In relation to this, Brackett et al. (2015) highlight that "not having the skills to understand and manage emotions can be disruptive to optimal social and cognitive development" (p. 21). Beside this, SEL may contribute to the prevention of diseases that have a negative impact on our health and thus promote an emotional balance that helps to generate a state of well-being (Ortega, 2010; Piqueras et al., 2009).

In this regard, if social-emotional learning is developed in schools (Salzburg Global Seminar, 2018), these will be friendlier and safer, facilitating the creation of balanced learning environments, support community cohesion and increasing the capacity of citizens to adapt to a changing society. Furthermore, Viitaniemi (2020) and Reicher & Matischek-Jauk (2017) indicate that the development of emotional skills at school provides tools to prevent bullying and enables the improvement of the overall climate of the whole educational community.

Beside this, Social-Emotional Learning offers the possibility of providing adequate support to implement specific programmes such as conflict resolution, sexual education, health education or substance use prevention in an interrelated way (Elias et al., 2015; Greenberg et al., 2003).

The development of SEL reduces violence and aggressive behaviour, promotes resilience and serves as a basis for reducing health risk behaviours related to substance use such as tobacco or alcohol (Cohen, 2001; Fopiano & Haynes, 2001).

Moreover, as Aldrup et al. (2020) point out, teachers who are trained in emotional education have more suitable relationships with their students, a better understanding of their students' problems and fewer disruptive problems in class. According to Extremera & Fernández-Berrocal (2004), the development of these emotional competences will enable teachers to cope with work-related stress and burnout.

Concretely, the main objective of this study is to analyse the type of training in emotional education received by future Early Childhood and Primary Education teachers at a Spanish university. This will allow us to know how their academic development is going and to find out which competences (intrapersonal, interpersonal and complementary) are worked the most in their initial training. With this, the aim is to try to implement training proposals that will contribute to health and well-being.This work is part of a doctoral thesis wich is being supported by the Goverment of Spain through a pre-doctoral contract for “University Professor Training (FPU18/01858)”.

Bullying and victimization persist as severe problems with various short- and long-term consequences (e.g., Moore et al., 2017), especially during adolescence. Therefore, research on possible protective factors for bullying and victimization is still needed. One of them can be mindfulness as adolescents who are more mindful may be involved in bullying and/or victimization to a lesser extent (Liu et al., 2022; Riggs & Brown, 2017; Yuan & Liu, 2021), however, the relationship between mindfulness, bullying, and victimization was mostly mediated by other factors, such as impulsivity, moral disengagement, internalizing and externalizing problems (e.g., Georgiou et al., 2019, 2021).

Bullying can be identified throughout several existing definitions of bullying behaviour which share the following common features: the purpose of bullying is to harm, it lasts for longer periods, and there is a difference in power between the bully and the victim. In this direction, current definitions describe bullying as a goal-directed behaviour that harms another individual in the context of power imbalance (Volk et al., 2017). There are several types of bullying, such as physical bullying, verbal bullying, social bullying (Marsh et al., 2011) and cyberbullying (Slonje & Smith, 2008).

Mindfulness is a non-judgmental and accepting awareness of present events and experiences (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Contemporary theories broaden mindfulness conceptualization into perceiving mindfulness as an ability rather than a trait as it can be enhanced by practice (i.e., yoga, mindfulness training). Adolescents that are more mindful are better at decision-making, have higher self-control and self-regulation, are better at decision-making, have a more positive and less negative affect, and their anger feelings are reduced in comparison with their peers who have lower levels of mindfulness (Black et al., 2012; Franco et al., 2016; Riggs et al., 2015).

There is a growing body of evidence regarding the relationship between bullying, victimization, and mindfulness, however, the research is still scarce as the connection between them is not as clear as expected, especially concerning bullying. Mindfulness and bullying are mostly negatively connected (Georgiou et al., 2019). As for the association between mindfulness and victimization, more mindful children had a lower risk of being victims of bullying behaviour (Murray-Close et al., 2014). Regarding the relationship between mindfulness and cyberbullying, studies showed that lower levels of mindfulness are related to cyberbullying over time (Yuan & Liu, 2021).

Furthermore, several researchers (e.g., Liu et al., 2022) aimed to study mindfulness-based interventions as anti-bullying programs. Programs included several mindfulness activities, such as quieting the mind, moving mindfully, mindful attention, managing negative emotions and negative thinking, and acknowledgement of self and others (Liu et al., 2022; Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010). Results suggested that youth that was included in the training had lower bullying behaviour scores (Liu et al., 2022).

Truth be told, more research is needed in this area to more thoroughly understand the role of mindfulness when examining bullying behaviour, especially its subdomains as it is crucial to understand the protective factors in order to offer approppriate support for adolescents in need. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to examine the relationship between mindfulness, different types of bullying and victimization (physical, verbal, social, cyber) by using structural equation modelling.

This presentation will address the mental health needs of children and youth in Bhutan as perceived by Bhutanese school counselors. School counseling is a profession slowly gaining momentum as it combines the important topic of children and youth mental health on the one hand and the school setting, a structure playing a central role in children’s development, on the other (Harris, 2013). Consequently, the field of global school counseling research is also becoming increasingly recognised as findings from individual countries can inform school counseling services in other countries (Salmon, 2016). Often referred to as the happiest country in the world, the Kingdom of Bhutan implemented its first 12, full-time school counselors in 2011. Today there are over 179 school counselors active across the kingdom’s nearly 600 schools (Ministry of Education, 2021) but very little is known about them. The growing mental health needs of Bhutanese children and youth exposed to evermore challenges such as substance abuse and rising unemployment (Chaudhuri, Dema, Wangmo, & Gautam, 2021; Dema et al., 2019; Ministry of Health, 2019; Pelden, 2016; Lorelle & Guth, 2013) together with a lack of psychiatric resources throughout the country (Sacra, 2017) and new challenges bought about by the COVID-19 pandemic (Namgyel & Milbert, 2021) underscore the importance of school counseling services in Bhutan. Bhutanese school counselors are at the forefront of the battle to protect Bhutanese students’ mental-health and well-being. That is why this study sought to understand the work of Bhutanese school counselors and the challenges they perceive to students’ mental health and well-being such as cultural factors that may be influencing help-seeking behavior. Specifically, this poster presentation will investigate the question: what are challenges to Bhutanese students’ mental health and well-being as perceived by Bhutanese school counselors? To this end, a mixed methods approach employing an on-line survey followed by on-line as well as in-person interviews of school counselors in Bhutan was carried out between November 2021 and September 2022. All 179 school counselors registered in Bhutan in 2021 were invited to participate in an online survey aimed at investigating their perceived roles, resources, and challenges. Responses were obtained from a representative sample of 162 school counselors of which 28 then participated in semi-structured interviews to obtain more in-depth and nuanced information. Because of the complexity of contemporary school counseling in Bhutan and the inherent interdependence of multi-level factors affecting school counseling (as evident from Bhutan’s published school counseling framework), this investigation was guided by Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). This model is ideal for investigating school counseling services in Bhutan as it considers Bhutanese school counselors not as isolated persons but as entities existing within and affected by the school environment they work in and the different factors that constitute it such as the physical school environment, school colleagues, the school counseling policy enacted by the government and how all of the above change over time. In addition, to situate the study in Bhutan’s cultural context, this investigation was further guided by Bhutan’s unique economic and political philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH) (Dakpa, Rabten, Rai, & Gurung, 2011). As such, Bronfenbrenner’s EST (1979) and the Kingdom of Bhutan’s famous GNH model were both used to guide data-analysis in order to understand the challenges to student’s mental-health including dynamic relations between the student, school system and wider community within Bhutan’s unique cultural context.