A US program originally designed to help hearing-impaired children recognize and understand the feelings of those around them is proving its worth as a universal, low cost, school-based strategy for improving children's behavior.

Demonstrating to schools how slight adjustments to the curriculum can produce widespread benefits has been a lifelong interest of Dr Mark Greenberg, Director of the Prevention Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Now being widely applied across mainstream education, his PATHS (Promoting Alternative THinking Strategies) curriculum has teachers working with students for about 30 minutes a day, three times a week over a six-month period. Part of the teaching is directed towards enabling young people to identify and understand feelings in others by using 'feeling faces' cards to identify them.

Greenberg notes that "by labeling the emotions clearly, children learn to recognize them in themselves and others, which will aid them in managing those emotions".

Rigorous evaluation of the PATHS curriculum has shown that the children who complete it display greater social competence and fewer behavioral and emotional problems. There is also compelling evidence that it leads to lower levels of aggression, anxiety and sadness.

Why should this happen? For Greenberg, a developmental psychologist, the effect is partly explained by the interaction between several complex cognitive processes, such as the ability to cope in stressful situations, and the development in early childhood of the prefrontal areas of the brain.

Deficiencies in the functioning of these lobes are thought to be linked to aggression, depression and attention disorders. The PATHS curriculum stimulates cognitive and emotional skills, and so enhances the child’s ability to cope with stress and make good choices.

What makes PATHS so attractive to schools is its universal application and obvious return in terms of children's readiness to learn. Program costs over a three-year period range from just $15 to $45 per student per year, depending on whether it is run by teaching staff or by employing an on-site coordinator.

The mechanisms that connect lessons in self control to reductions in negative behaviors are explored in Greenberg's recent paper for the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Articulating his connected interests in neurological development and prevention to improve children's well-being, it is part of a special edition based on a conference on Resilience in Children at Reagan National Airport in Arlington Virginia in the spring of 2006.

See: "Promoting resilience in children and youth. Preventative interventions and their interface with neuroscience” Mark Greenberg, (and others) Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, December 2006, Vol 1094, pp139-150

• first published in Prevention Action on 18 September 2007