The development of emotion regulation and interpersonal skills is an important task for schoolchildren, and learning and developing such tasks while of elementary school age is critical for individuals’ later life. The difficulty associated with emotion regulation in schoolchildren can exert huge, long-lasting impacts on children. The vast majority of mental illnesses are associated with difficulty regarding emotion regulation. The brain science research on emotion regulation has also found that emotional adjustment and the cognitive brain regions overlap each other in many brain areas and that emotional responses and cognitive function interact. Moreover, difficulty regarding emotion regulation is closely related to depression and also inhibits executive functions such as working memory and inhibition control, often leading to subsequent substance abuse. For example, previous studies have found that difficulties associated with emotion regulation in childhood are closed related to attention deficit, hyperactivity, and other types of psychological disorders.

The research on mindfulness-based interventions for adults has shown that these can benefit emotion regulation, reduce pain and physical symptoms, reduce negative emotions such as anxiety, depression, and rumination, and improve self-awareness and psychological flexibility. Mindfulness education for children is receiving increasing attention due to its potential to increase children’s attention, cognitive function and emotion regulation as well as promote proactive interpersonal relationships for this group. However, the purpose of mindfulness education for children is not simply to reduce their behavioral problems and physic-psychosocial symptoms, as its primary goal is to enhance children´s ability to relate to the self, both physically and psychosocially, and learn how to apply mindfulness activities and skills to their daily life. Therefore, children can foster their self-regulation ability, whatever situation they encounter. In order to fulfill this purpose, mindfulness education should follow the whole structural format of the mindfulness-based interventional programs (MBIPs) as well as brain-focused strategies to understand what sparks our instinctive, autonomic reflexes and how.

However, implementing a children’s mindfulness education program in educational settings in Taiwan is still in the initial stage. To test the benefits of a children´s mindfulness education program containing brain-focused strategies on children´s emotion regulation and interpersonal relationship promotion, and the feasibility of its implementation in elementary schools in Taiwan, this study employs a mixed quantitative and qualitative research design. Additionally, considering the actual teaching situation, a total of 51 grade five elementary schoolchildren from two classes were recruited from a New Taipei City elementary school and were randomly assigned on a class-basis to a mindfulness education group and a waiting-list control group. The children in the experimental mindfulness group attended a 12-week "Children´s mindfulness education program", which entailed 40-minutes per week of mindfulness teaching. The content of the mindfulness education program met the requirements of the mindfulness-based intervention program format and MindUp curriculum architecture. At the same time, the children in the control group attended their usual classes. Both self-reported questionnaires and qualitative interview data were obtained before and after the intervention. The self-reported questionnaires, including the Youth Version of the Emotional Quotient Inventory, the Emotion Regulation Scale, and the Positive Emotion Scale, were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. Qualitative interviews with both the participants in the mindfulness group and their school teachers were included to reveal the experience of learning mindfulness in context. A one-way ANCOVA was applied to analyze the quantitative data, and a semantic analysis was used to analyze the verbatim transcripts of the interviews.

The quantitative result shows that statistically significant differences were found between the groups in terms of their total scores for the Emotional Quotient Inventory and the Emotion Regulation Scale. The scores of the interpersonal subscale in the Emotional Quotient Inventory and the emotional efficacy subscale scores on the Emotion Regulation Scale differed significantly between the two groups, although the scores for the Positive Emotion Scale did not. We assume that the reason why the score for the Positive Emotion Scale of the experimental group children did not change significantly may be related to the scale itself, since the questionnaire is based on positive psychology and cognitive theory, emphasizing the strategy of replacing negative emotions and thoughts with positive ones. The cognitive method of emotion regulation strategies emphasized the ability to re-appraise emotional and cognitive messages and change their content from negative to positive, but mindfulness emotion regulation strategies focus only on practiced acceptance and non-response to these emotions and cognitive content that are not based on the reality, which statement of the items of the Positive Emotion Scale may confuse the young students.

What echoes our assumption is that the qualitative data demonstrated that the emotional adjustment-related benefits perceived by the students in the experimental group after receiving mindfulness education courses include the following main themes: increased emotional awareness, decreased frequency of strong emotional responses, improved automated responses, changes in emotional response strategies and behavior, and decreased emotional behavior, which are also consistent with their teachers’ reports. Moreover, the students in the experimental group also stated that they felt happier, calmer, cheerful, relaxed and other pleasant emotions after attending the mindfulness courses, as well as having a positive attitude toward knowing gratitude, self-confidence, a willingness to try, a willingness to share, and the courage to admit mistakes, which are consistent with the changes observed by the teachers, according to the teachers’ interview data.

Nevertheless, there are some limitations to this study, including the failure to include an active control group as a comparison, so it is impossible to determine whether the overall effectiveness of the intervention was influenced by other factors, such as the leader of the mindfulness teacher and group dynamics. Moreover, being limited by the availability of valid mindfulness-based emotional measurements and scales in Taiwan for youth, this study cannot explain fully the mechanism whereby students manage their emotional impacts after receiving mindfulness education. Furthermore, although the study combines qualitative and quantitative research measurements, it is essentially self-reported data, so future research might include more objective measurement tools and methods, such as physiological biofeedback or neuropsychological testing.

This study did not conduct a follow-up assessment, so it is impossible to speculate whether the children´s mindfulness education curriculum extends over time once the courses have finished.

In sum, based on the quantitative and qualitative results, children who received mindfulness education are generally able to apply mindfulness skills to their learning situations and daily life and can enhance their self-awareness regarding their emotions through the facilitation of emotional expression objectively. The children’s increased ability to perceive and accept their emotions and express their emotions led to improved overall emotion regulation and emotional intelligence as well as more satisfying interpersonal relationships and interactions among this group. The current study echoes the previous studies on mindfulness education that demonstrate that a children’s mindfulness education program can effectively promote children´s emotion regulation and promote proactive interpersonal relationships. In addition to the interview data, it suggests that a children’s mindfulness education program is highly feasible within Taiwan’s current national education system, as it will constitute an important “emotion regulation and social-interpersonal promotion” course for elementary schoolchildren.