Emotional competence is a central resource for flourishing human development (Saarni, 2011) and can be understood as the “efficacy in accomplishing adaptive goals in emotionally arousing situations” (Thompson, 1999). It is a prerequisite to live in accordance with one´s values (Saarni, 1999) and, to build and maintain healthy and mutually beneficial social relationships (Garner, 2010). An improvement of emotional competence leads to better mental and physical health, academic success, and better vocational opportunities (Jones & Kahn, 2017).

This high importance of emotional competence for qualification, socialization and subjectification makes it crucial for Bildung (Biesta, 2020) on different levels: learning about, learning with and learning through emotions. While the literature on specific facets of emotional competence is far away from reaching consensus, it is possible to synthesize five core competencies that have strong intersections between different conceptualizations (Brackett et al., 2019; CASEL, 2020; Garner, 2010; Saarni, 1999).

1.    Knowledge and attitudes about emotions

2.    Recognition of emotion

3.    Expression of emotion

4.    Regulation of emotion and

5.    Empathy

In terms of its practical application in educational settings, social and emotional learning (SEL) is a programmatic and structured approach to strengthen emotional competence. Over the last decades, a growing interest in SEL within schools can be observed (Weissberg et al., 2015). Internationally, an increasing number of politicians support specific programs for promoting emotional competence through SEL (Cefai et al., 2017). Those programs showed diverse positive effects concerning mental health, school performance, and quality of social relationships throughout a diverse range of geographical regions, cultural, socioeconomic and ethnic groups (Cefai et al., 2017). These comprehensive benefits make SEL programs, even under a strictly economic perspective, a desirable investment for society, returning between 2-12$ for each 1$ spend (Belfield et al., 2015).

Yet, though the importance of SEL is increasingly recognized, little systematic knowledge is currently available on the extent to which emotional competence is currently part of the underlying structures of education systems, as represented in formal documents. While it is known that the cognitive dimension of learning is strongly represented within educational curricula, this research focuses on assessing the affective dimension of learning therein. Based on a conceptual demarcation of the five core facets of emotional competence, we take the example of the German education system and explore the extent and quality to which emotional competencies are already integrated within its curricula.

To better understand the role of emotions, socio-emotional learning, and specifically, emotional competence within the German education system, we systematically assessed school curricula, using a combination of lexical searches for keywords and qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014). The dataset includes 422 currently valid curricula from all 16 federal states (cut-off date: 06th of December 2021) for grades 4 (primary education) and 9 (secondary education, all school forms). Documents were included from three subjects in primary education (German, English, General Studies) as well as ten subjects in secondary education (German, English, Economics, Politics, Ethics/Philosophy, Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Natural Science; see Holst et al., 2020). To systematically identify text segments referring to facets of emotional competence, lexical searches were conducted in MAXQDA 2020.2, using the German equivalents to “emot*”, “empath*” and “feel*”. After coding all relevant parts of the curricula, four curricula were randomly chosen from the dataset for full text screening to explore whether important keywords were missing, leading to additional lexical searches for the German equivalents to “self control”, “self regulation”, “frustration tolerance”, “change in perspective”, “mood/atmosphere” and “emoj*”. In coding the respective sections of all curricula, an apparent saturation effect was observed with regard to finding new relevant text segments. For assessment of all text segments relating to facets of emotional competence, a deductive coding scheme was developed based on the conceptual framework introduced above. The resulting code-system was analyzed both quantitatively - e.g. regarding differences between years of publication, school forms, age groups and subjects - and qualitatively, giving insights into the specific ways in which emotional competence is embedded within curricula of the German school system. In addition to the preliminary descriptive statistics outlined below, a negative binomial regression is also calculated to model the predicted number of references to emotional competence based on the variables federal states, subjects, years of publication, and type of school (controlling for the number of words within documents).

Some quantitative results available at the time of submission are briefly outlined. Of the 422 curricular documents assessed, 58,1% included at least one reference to facets of emotional competence. In total, we found 1214 text segments that explicitly or implicitly call for a strengthening of emotional competence (⌀ 2,88 per document). The most frequently addressed competence is expression of emotion (in 30,8% of documents; ⌀ 0,90 per document). Somewhat rarer addressed are empathy (29,6%; ⌀ 0,56), followed by emotion recognition (23,9%; ⌀ 0,62), knowledge and attitudes about emotions (21,3%; ⌀ 0,57), and emotion regulation (10%; ⌀ 0,14). Strong differences were observed between the different subjects (χ²: p < .001). 7 of the 11 analyzed subjects (Economics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Politics, Geography, Natural Science, Biology) have on average less than one reference to emotional competence per document. In contrast, the implementation in languages (German = 4,90; English = 4,61) and General Studies (3,88) is far stronger. The strongest integration was observed in Ethics/Philosophy, with 6,77 references per document on average. Also regarding the school type, significant differences were found. By far the strongest implementation was observed within elementary school curricula. Here, in 75% of curricula, at least one reference to emotional competence is made, and ⌀ 3,80 per document were found on average. In contrast, the least references for strengthening emotional competencies on average were seen in comprehensive school (⌀ 2,12). Here, 56,1% of documents refer at least once to a strengthening emotional competence. In addition to further descriptive statistics, at ECER 2022, qualitative insights will be discussed and a negative binomial regression will refine the overview of the implementation of emotional competence in German curricula. Based on the analysis, implications are derived for education policy, practice as well as further research on SEL and emotional competencies.

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