Researchers in psychology and education from the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) have created Emocionatest, an application for mobile phones and tablets that enables to evaluate the emotional competence of children aged between three and twelve in a friendly, interactive gaming environment. This app facilitates the diagnosis of abnormalities or delays when children recognize and manage their emotions and is addressed to the psycho-educational community. The new tool has been validated by field studies of a demonstration project for the creation of a prototype funded by the UJI and supervised by the Office for Cooperative Research and Technological Development (OCIT) of this academic institution.

The novelty of Emocionatest regarding the current supply of this type of technology is a video game design format, in which also participated Francisco Ramos, lecturer from the Department of Computer Languages and Systems. This format is much more challenging for children than the traditional psychological tests because it allows them to interact. In turn, this device is also innovative as a diagnostic tool.

“This app provides freedom to choose the most appropriate place to carry out the assessment, since only a mobile device is needed and it does not require any specific classroom that can influence the attitude of children, and also facilitates the task to the schools that are interested in using it”, explains Edgar Bresó, one of the creators of Emocionatest, and researcher in social psychology and expert in emotional intelligence from the UJI.

Clara Andrés, lecturer of Evolutionary Psychology and Education, is also author of Emocionatest. Her study focuses on the evaluation of social cognition in children with communication difficulties, and in the absence of comprehensive evaluation materials adapted to children with developmental difficulties, she promoted the design of new ones. Thus, "the structure and design of this app are based, on the one hand, in the analysis of evolutionary studies on development of emotional competence in children with typical levels and, on the other hand, in the particularities of this development in the population with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)”, Andrés explains.

SCREENS FOR IDENTIFYING EMOTIONS

Emocionatest has five levels of increasing difficulty and it is based in a fun and especially visual assessment method. In addition, the app provides quantitative and qualitative information on this skill. “In other words, we can know how many emotions do children correctly identify, and also see, on error, what options are mistaken”, added the lecturer. The skills tested are related to the recognition and construction of facial expressions; the identification of emotions from common situations and the perception of emotions based on cognitive experiences and other kind of hidden experiences.

Children with autism spectrum disorder have difficulties to be emotionally competent throughout their development because of their troubles in understanding the minds of others. In addition, children with other disorders, such as those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or specific language impairment (SLI), also manifested sometimes certain incompetence, for example, when regulating their emotions or identifying emotions based on beliefs, as a result of their inhibitory problems –in the case of ADHD–, or language delay, in cases of SLI. Most studies have focused on the assessment and, consequently, on the training of partial aspects of emotional competence, such as the recognition of facial expressions. In the opinion of Clara Andrés, “they are forgetting other important components, such as emotional regulation or differentiation of internal and external emotions, which we incorporate in Emocionatest by understandable auditory, tactile, and visual stimuli”.

Emocionatest’s software is registered and its technology can be used in sectors such as school education and psychology, hospitals and centres devoted to the care of patients with autism, and also for research in developmental psychology and developmental disorders. This mobile application will be presented at the International Congress on Emotional Intelligence hosted by the UJI on 10 and 11 November.

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