Emotional awareness in school-aged children: A contribution to the Italian validation of the Leas-C

This paper proposes preliminary results in support of the Italian validation of the Emotional Awareness Scale for Children (LEAS-C; Bajgar et al., 2005; Lane et al., 1990). This scale evaluates self and others' emotional awareness in schoolaged children. We tested 125 children (third, fourth and fifth classes) and we examined the relationships between LEAS-C (both performance and verbal productivity), three empathy tests, three Theory of Mind tests and two linguistic subscale of the WISC-III. Results show that the LEAS-C has good reliability and validity. Additionally, the relationship between emotional awareness and one of the empathy test shows that the LEAS-C has a good convergent validity. The absence of a relation between emotional awareness and Theory of Mind tests provides an index of discriminant validity of the Italian LEAS-C. Finally, the study shows a possible developmental trend for the emotional awareness and empathy; in fact, these constructs are positively correlated in children of the third and fourth school classes, but not in the older ones. We hypothesize that the development of empathy and emotional awareness proceeds along similar paths in children of third and fourth classes and than they become independent from each other. The conclusions provide explanatory hypothesises and future directions for the research.