The text will examine the concept of affective style and how negative emotionality or reactivity and emotional regulation can interfere with social competency as well as academic and behavioral competency.
Because poorly regulated children are at risk for serious adjustment difficulties, school psychologists need strategies to help children improve in self-regulatory skills. Knowledge about how to help children access a range of emotions, to modulate the intensity of emotion, and to shift from one emotional state to another is a critical need. In addition, school psychologists and other mental health workers need to learn how to help parents understand their vital role in influencing the development of self-regulatory skills in their children.
This text will also review the more extreme disorders of emotional regulation because understanding children who experience the most extreme difficulties with emotional regulation can help us develop interventions for children whose issues are less intense.
As society becomes more stressful and complex, while at the same time the demands for performance increase, school-aged children are at increasing risk for adjustment difficulties. School psychologists and other mental health workers in schools are hungry for concrete approaches to help children develop relationships, to be more successful in the classroom and in the peer group. Most important, this text will contain many practical strategies for helping children, their families and their teachers to help children more successfully negotiate their worlds on a day-to-day basis.
Gayle L. Macklem, MA, NCSP, LEP, is a Massachusetts licensed school psychologist and a Massachusetts-licensed educational psychologist. She has served in the field of education for 30 years. A former president of the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association (MSPA), she serves as the Technology Chairperson of the state association. Gayle is an adjunct instructor in the Counseling and School Psychology Specialist Training Program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Gayle writes curriculum and writes on topics of interest to educators. She is a frequent presenter at regional and national conferences. Gayle is the author of Springer’s Bullying and teasing: Social power in children’s groups (2003).