Socioemotional competencies, student engagement and performance at university – a cross-cultural project

Students at university go through adolescence to adulthood. While acquiring new knowledge and competences, university students also deal with significant challenges, such as identity exploration and balance achievement between academic obligations, leisure time and house demanding tasks. Therefore, college students may experience mental health issues, substance use problems, which can lead to a lack of involvement with university, academic performance decrease, absenteeism, or even dropout. Positive Youth Development (PYD) focus on the enhancement of youth strengths to achieve a healthy, productive and meaningful youth (Lerner et al., 2011; Shek, Dou, Zhu, & Chai, 2019). PYD is associated with emotional competence (Lau & Wu, 2012) and may depend on several situational factors such as the academic context (Årdal, Holsen, Diseth, & Larsen, 2018; Matos, Santos, Reis, Goméz-baya, & Marques, 2018). Grounded in the PYD framework and accounting for both cultural and individual variables, this project has two principal aims: 1) to study emotional competence and prosocial behaviour as predictors of student engagement (study 1); 2) to study the moderator effect of resilience internal assets on the relationship between psychosocial difficulties and academic performance (Study 2).