The growing concerns regarding the risks of transmitting the COVID-19 virus have intensified the job-related stressors commonly encountered by teachers in various cultural contexts. Evidence shows how the COVID-19 crisis has negatively impacted teachers' mental health outcomes such as stress, depression, and quality of life, which highlights the significance of designing psychological programs to boost teachers' well-being. This study examined the effects of a well-being intervention based on the Positivity, Relationship, Outcomes, Strength, Purpose, Engagement, and Resilience (PROSPER) framework on well-being outcomes among 76 in-service teachers (Mage = 26.05 years, SD = 4.71, range = 20–45; female = 93.4%) in Hong Kong. Participants completed survey measures associated with the seven PROSPER outcomes at baseline and 2-month follow-up. Multivariate regression analysis indicated that there were statistically significant multivariate effects for intervention conditions, Wilks' Lambda F(7, 58) = 4.50, p =.01. Results demonstrated that teachers who were assigned to the intervention condition (n = 36) had significantly higher scores than those in the control condition (n = 40) on positivity (b = 0.41, 95% CI [0.16, 0.65], p =.01), strength (b = 0.62, 95% CI [0.23, 1.01], p =.01), purpose (b = 0.61, 95% CI [0.18, 1.04], p =.01), and resilience (b = 0.57, 95% CI [0.07, 1.07], p =.04). Our findings provide evidence on the mental health benefits of the PROSPER-based psychological intervention program for preschool teachers. Copyright © 2022 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Research findings: This study explored the latent structure of socioemotional competence among Chinese kindergarten children in Hong Kong, China, developing and validating a culturally relevant, teacher-reported measure, the Chinese Inventory of Children’s Socioemotional Competence (CICSEC). Cross-sectional questionnaire data were collected on two samples of children from Hong Kong (N₁ = 1,731; N₂ = 475). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed that, children’s socioemotional competence was best represented by a two-level, four-factor model, a model that was invariant across child gender and grade levels. Four first-level factors, cognitive control, emotion expressivity, empathy and prosocial behaviors, and emotion regulation, were identified, and they were subsumed under a second-level, overarching factor: socioemotional competence. CICSEC demonstrated many good psychometric properties: The entire scale and the four subscales exhibited excellent internal consistencies. Moreover, it demonstrated criterion validity by being correlated positively with school readiness and negatively with problem behaviors. It also demonstrated incremental validity by explaining unique variance in school readiness, above and beyond an existing measure of children’s socioemotional competence. Practice or policy: Findings pointed to the advantages of using culturally specific, locally derived measures in assessing socioemotional competence and understanding child adjustment. Copyright © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This study investigated the conceptualization of children's socioemotional competence among parents and teachers of preschool children in Hong Kong, China. Focus groups were conducted with 16 parents and 18 teachers from three preschools. Thematic content analysis revealed that, reflecting the cultural as well as contextual characteristics of Hong Kong, parents and teachers expected socioemotionally competent children to master skills in emotion understanding, emotion expressivity, emotion regulation, relationship building, conflict management, and inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility. There was diversity within parents' and teachers' interpretations of the characteristics of emotionally regulated and socially skilled children. Findings highlighted the ecosystemic nature of societal ideas about children's developmental competence, demonstrated the utility of qualitative research in exploring these ideas in culturally sensitive manners, and called for the mobilization of parents and teachers as research-informed scaffolders of holistic development of children. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.