Impact of a School-Based SEL Intervention on Children’s Emotion Understanding Across Two Cross-Cultural Educational Contexts

Childhood is a crucial period for enhancing socioemotional skills, which lay the foundation for development and mental health in adulthood. Consequently, research in early years focuses on emotion understanding as a central component of broader emotional skills, highlighting the role of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs and the influence of factors such as sex, culture, socioeconomic status, and context. This study examines the impact of a seven-month school-based SEL intervention on children’s emotion understanding across two cross-cultural contexts, Spain and Venezuela. A quasi-experimental factorial design with pretest and post-test measures, under a quantitative methodology, was conducted with 224 children enrolled in the 4- and 5-year-old levels of Early Childhood Education, and Grades 1–2 and 3–4 of Primary Education. The Emotion Matching Task and the Test of Emotion Comprehension were used for data collection. Results indicated that participation in the intervention was associated with improvements in emotion understanding, although the magnitude varied across schools and educational stages. Therefore, this study argues how SEL initiatives interact dynamically with school culture, community characteristics, and the organizational structures that support SEL.