ENHANCING THE CAPACITY FOR EMOTION REGULATION IN STUDENTS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES

Given the important role that emotion regulation plays in personal, academic and professional areas, it is essential to incorporate teaching methods to develop emotional skills into everyday educational practice. This is particularly relevant for students with special educational needs. In line with this, we have developed a teaching project to study the effects of educational psychodrama on the capacity for emotion regulation in children with intellectual disabilities. The educational psychodrama is a particularly appropriate teaching methodology to enhance socio-emotional abilities. The dramatic play is used to integrate different aspects involved in learning situations. Educational psychodrama is mainly based on the dynamics of communication; it will be facilitated and directed towards preset educational objectives. In socio-emotional education, psychodrama is a way to promote personal growth. It allows developing spontaneity and integrating body pulses, emotions, feelings, thinking and self-regulation. The participants in this study included 3 students with intellectual disabilities. All participants were from a special education school in the public school network of the city of Zaragoza (Spain). Children ranged in age from 14 to 16 years old (M = 15; SD = 1.15). All children with intellectual disabilities who participated in this study had significant individual changes affecting the whole curriculum. The program includes different work sessions developed in daily classroom routine for five consecutive months. The results of each participant in the natural context of class (before and during the program was implemented) were recorded by a scale of emotional management based on Izard's differential emotions scale list. The design for the assessment of an effective treatment implementation is the so called multiple baseline design, in terms of statistical meaning. The results of the study show an improvement in the ability of self-regulation in the participants from the first session of the program. The findings of this study therefore support the notion that structured interventions based on educational psychodrama may be useful in the classroom to develop social and emotional skills in students with intellectual disabilities. Educational psychodrama facilitates key aspects in behavior control such as: emotion regulation, introspection and appropriate expression of emotions.