Prior research has related children's prosocial behavior to overall well-being, and stimulating prosocial behavior is the aim of many social-emotional skills interventions. This study assessed if affirming children's autonomy stimulates their psychosocial behavior. We conducted a three-arm microtrial with four repeated measures to assess if a social-emotional skills intervention with an autonomy affirmation component had an additive effect on children's behavior as compared to a “regular” intervention focused exclusively on teaching social-emotional skills and a no-treatment control condition. Our sample consisted of 779 children in Grades 4–6 (M_age = 10.61, SD = 0.93). Findings from latent change modeling demonstrated that the social-emotional skills intervention with an autonomy affirmation component yielded superior effects as compared to the “regular” intervention and the no-treatment control condition on the improvement of internalizing and externalizing problem behavior in the three-month period after the intervention. The intervention with autonomy affirmation did not yield superior effects on prosociality and social skills, self-efficacy, and self-esteem or self-perceived competence. The absence of these effects may be attributed to the dosage of the interventions implemented—the affirmation of children's autonomy may require more than four sessions to sort observable effects. Overall, however, the findings of this study provide an initial suggestion that it may be beneficial to affirm children's autonomy and prosocial intentions when enhancing children's behavior.

先前的研究已将儿童的亲社会行为与整体幸福感联系起来，而刺激亲社会行为是许多社会情感技能干预的目标。这项研究评估了肯定儿童的自主权是否会刺激他们的心理社会行为。我们进行了一项包含四项重复测量的三臂微型试验，以评估与仅专注于教授社交情感技能和无治疗控制条件。我们的样本包括 779 名 4-6 年级的儿童（M_年龄 = 10.61，SD = 0.93)。潜在变化模型的结果表明，与“常规”干预和不治疗控制条件相比，具有自主肯定成分的社会情绪技能干预在三个月内改善内化和外化问题行为方面产生了更好的效果干预后的时期。自主肯定干预对亲社会性和社交技能、自我效能、自尊或自我感知能力没有产生更好的影响。这些影响的缺失可能归因于所实施干预措施的剂量——对儿童自主权的肯定可能需要超过四次会议才能对可观察到的影响进行分类。然而，总的来说，