Well-being is essential to a healthy life, with many interacting dimensions (physical, emotional, social, financial, spiritual, environmental) that influence each other in contributing to lifelong health outcomes. In this presentation, we specifically target emotional well-being as one mechanism to total health, which is defined by the World Health Organization as not only the absence of disease and illness but also the presence of well-being across different dimensions.
As one of the dimensions to total health, emotional well-being (EWB) is a multi-dimensional construct that encompasses how positive an individual feels generally and about life overall (Park et al., 2022). It includes both experiential (e.g. positive affect) and reflective (e.g. life satisfaction, meaning, goal-pursuit) features. Although school psychologists have access to many resources that can support emotional health, oftentimes these resources emphasize remediation of problems over explicit focus on promotion of well-being. As an example, this is commonly found within the realm of assessment, wherein the majority of measures are deficit or pathology-focused and school psychologists are left to sort for items reflecting well-being. Over the past few years, our teams have worked to increase awareness of these gaps, and develop resources to bring explicit attention to emotional well-being. As related to assessment, for example, we have developed a freely-available, online repository of EWB measures (https://m3ewb.research.uconn.edu/ewb-subjective-measures-repository/) as a resource for validated and appropriate measures of EWB for their students and clients.
Many parallels exist with regard to intervention supports, with majority efforts focused on addressing more intensive social, emotional, and behavioral supports over universal promotion and prevention efforts. Schools, however, hold tremendous potential in promotion of emotional well-being for both students and adults through integration of strategies that can be usable by every member of the school community. Usable strategies must be simple – meaning easily built into daily routines and able to be widely used by all. Embry and Biglan (2008) described such simple strategies as a broad approach to reducing risk using evidence-based strategies that could be applied at the population level. These simple strategies – or kernels – are evidence-based, cost efficient, and highly usable (Embry & Biglan, 2008; Jones et al., 2017). Importantly, simple strategies can be adapted to increase fit for each unique context – by developmental stage, setting (e.g., classroom, transition, afterschool, recess), and/or cultural relevance and appropriateness (e.g., norms, values).
In this presentation, resources will be shared regarding simple strategies for promoting emotional well-being that can be integrated within existing school initiatives and easily adapted to fit different contexts. Examples and supporting evidence will be provided for each, which are organized into categories such as self-soothing, self-awareness, and social relationships. Review of freely accessible resources to further demonstrate adaptation for use across student, educator, or family populations will be provided. These resources include a newly updated UConn Collaboratory of School and Child Health report on simple strategies that anyone can use to foster emotional well-being as well as an open-access set of modules for diving in to the pieces to emotional well-being and evidence-based strategies for supporting the various pieces toward fostering a healthy life.
