REMINISCING TRAINING AND SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN

Reminiscing, a conversation between child and caregiver about past events experienced together, has been extensively studied with parent-child dyads of preschool and school-age children (Sales & Fivush, 2005). Researchers have proposed interventions to enhance the elaborative style and emotional aspects associated with caregivers’ reminiscing, with positive effects on children’s socio-emotional and cognitive skills (Corsano & Guidotti, 2019). Nevertheless, research within extra-familiar contexts is still limited (Andrews et al., 2019). This study aims to verify the efficacy of training aimed at improving the reminiscing skills of psychologists working with Special Needs children on psycho-educational topics and academic skills. The decision to explore this theme concerning these children was dictated by the awareness that they often present a psychological profile characterized by emotional difficulties, low self-esteem, social and cognitive problems connected to their peculiar condition, which can be improved by reminiscing. Participants were divided into an experimental group (twelve dyads) and a control group (eight dyads). Each dyad comprised of one psychologist and one child with SN aged between 8 and 10 years. The psychologists in the experimental group took part in training (3 meetings) about reminiscing, while those in the control group took part in training (3 meetings) about play. Tools proposed to psychologist in the pre and post-test were Caregiver Child Reminiscence Scale (Kulkofsky & Koh, 2009); Children’s Coping Strategies (Goodvin & Romdall, 2013). Tools proposed to children were Test of Emotion Comprehension (Pons & Harris, 2000); Self-Description Questionnaire (Marsh, 1990); Narrative speech evaluation (BVL_4-12, Marini et al., 2015). During an audio-recorded reminiscing conversation in pre and post-test, reminiscing style, presence of emotional terms and references to the Self were measured for each member of the dyad. In the experimental group, the non-parametric ANOVA highlighted, at the post-test, an increase in reminiscing habits and in the use of elaborative style, both for psychologists and children. In general, no increases in children's skills emerged; however, from an analysis of individual children’s profile it was found that for some of them training improved their socio-emotional abilities. Training promoted greater awareness of the use of this practice among psychologists, confirming what had already been found in the literature on the effectiveness of training among caregivers.