Enactive playful interventions improve social integration and health in children

LOZADA M.; D'ADAMO, P.

Encuentro; 52nd annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society will be held in Madrid; 2023

Play can foster socialization, self-regulation, and cognitive processes. According to the Enactive theory playful situations can help surpass pre-established boundaries within social domains, recreating social ties and group dynamics. In the current study, we further evaluate how participation in enactive interventions, which seek to foster self-awareness and awareness of others in a playful way, can enhance social integration and health. We conducted four playful enactive interventions that consisted of diverse activities including mind-body integration practices and cooperative games (non-competitive play). The interventions were conducted in four schools of Bariloche, Argentina, involving 153 children (6-8-year-olds), half constituted the intervention groups and half the waitlist groups. Before and after the interventions, we evaluated: social integration (through sociometric questionnaires) and stress levels (through perceived-stress self-reports, salivary or hair cortisol levels). In two of the schools a qualitative interview was conducted after the intervention to determine whether the children continued performing the learnt practices outside school and in what situations. Results showed that after participating in the interventions, peer relationships improved and children’s chronic stress significantly decreased. Conversely, these changes were not observed in the waitlist groups. The majority of the interviewed children reported that they continued using the self-awareness practices outside school in situations where they felt afraid, anxious, angry, emotionally unstable. Our findings provide new evidence of how agency, wellbeing and social bonding can be fostered by playful enactive intervention, in which non-competitive play seems to promote a climate of affection within the group, favoring empathy and social connectedness in educational contexts.