Sport Practice, Fluid Reasoning, and Soft Skills in 10- to 18-Year-Olds

The Italian Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI-I)

The importance of social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills is recognized worldwide, but their measurement has always been a challenge. The BESSI measures 32 SEB skills, divided into five domains (social engagement, cooperation, self-management, emotional resilience, and innovation), but its validity must be expanded to new languages and contexts. Across two studies (N1 = 990, N2= 824) we developed the Italian version of the BESSI, provided further support for its convergent and discriminant validity with the Big Five, and expanded its nomological network to procrastination, self-efficacy, and emotion regulation. The BESSI-I showed excellent internal reliability and satisfactory fit indices at the facet, domain, and overarching framework level. We also confirmed the correlations between the SEB skills and the Big Five personality traits and found meaningful correlations with the selected external outcomes. Overall, we confirm that the BESSI-I is a valid and useful instrument to assess SEB skills for research and clinical purposes.

Modeling the effect of postgraduate courses on soft skills: a practical approach

Over the last decade, Higher Education has focused more of its attention toward soft skills compared to traditional technical skills. Nevertheless, there are not many studies concerning the relation between the courses followed within an academic program and the development of soft skills. This work presents a practical approach to model the effects of courses on soft skills proficiency. Multiple Membership Ordinal Logistic Regression models are trained with real data from students of the 2021, 2022, and 2023 cohorts from the general engineering program in a French Higher Education institution. The results show that attending a postgraduate course in average increases the odds of being more proficient in terms of soft skills. Nonetheless, there is considerable variability in the individual effect of courses, which suggest there can be huge differences between courses. Moreover, the data also suggest great dispersion in the students' initial soft skill proficiency.

Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Skills: Age and Gender Differences at 12 to 19 Years Old

Individuals use social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills to build and maintain social relationships, regulate emotions, and manage goal-directed behaviors. A promising integrative framework of SEB skills was recently proposed, showing that they matter for positive outcomes during adolescence. Nothing is known about how and whether they differ between 12 and 19 years old and whether such differences depend on gender (males or females). Uncovering their age trajectories is fundamental because SEB skills are highly needed during this period of life. Educators, psychologists, and policymakers need to understand when, why, and how interventions concerning SEB skills should be proposed, potentially considering male and female profiles. To cover this gap, we cross-sectionally analyzed data from 4106 participants (2215 females, 12-19 years old). We highlighted age and gender differences in the five domains of SEB skills (self-management, innovation, cooperation, social engagement, and emotional resilience). Our results show that each SEB skill follows a specific age trend: emotional resilience and cooperation skills increase naturally between 12 and 19 years old, while innovation, social engagement, and self-management skills decline, especially between 12 and 16 years old, and grow later. The trajectories of self-management, social engagement, and emotional resilience skills also differ between males and females. Importantly, we detected declines in SEB skills (especially for social engagement and innovation skills) that can inform policies and interventions to sustain SEB skills in youths to favor their well-being and success in this crucial period.