EFFECTIVENESS OF PROSCIG© INTERVENTION PROGRAM IN BUILDING INTERACTION AND COOPERATION AT THE SOCIO-COGNITIVE LEVEL THROUGH ACTIVATION OF MENTAL SCHEMAS AND COGNITIVE PLASTICITY

Psychosocial skills are necessary for interpersonal skills and believed to determine children’s success in developing peer relationships. A Clinical Social Cognitive Intervention Program (PROSCIG©) in peer groups of English state primary school pupils, aged ten to eleven years in the UK, in transition to secondary school was implemented, aiming to improve appropriate psychosocial competences (capabilities) and inadequacies, based on the changeability of mental representations in the semantic network. The objective of this programme is to promote socio-cognitive skills (cognitive interpretative understanding and personal and interpersonal coordination perspective), in three important areas: social perception, self-regulation and social problems solving. The sample of three experimental groups (EGmix, EGlow, EGage) and of one control group used 27 children from a first data collection and fifteen children from a second, chosen through four instruments (SSQ, SCPQ, SDQ and SSIS) and the WISC-IV English. Thereafter, those four instruments, plus the FQS, were used to assess Dependent Variable (in the periods Before versus After), forming, in the first collection, EGmix (six subjects) and the CGmix (six subjects), of high and low psychosocial skills (mixed) and, in the second collection, the experimental groups EGage, (six average subjects and EGlow, (5 subjects), represented by both genders. Results showed that: 1) the main areas of improvement (p < 0.001) for the three EGs were in psychosocial interaction and cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility, empathy, commitment, self-control, help; that being security and communication; 2) the EGmix results were very Significant (p< 0.001); 3) PROSCIG© shows that it is mainly in the EGmix and EGlow that new psychosocial cognitive connections are created when they produce their own mental representations and, 4) the results of the CGmix placebo activities only had effects on improved educational achievement resulting from having worked individually.The PROSCIG© methodology shows to be effective for improving psychosocial skills and mitigating inadequate psychosocial competences. The effects were most pronounced in mixed abilities groups (children with high psychosocial skills and those with low psychosocial skills).