Research on the Mood Meter and role-play for adolescent emotion regulation

The Mood Meter is a chart for locating a feeling. Role-play is one way students practice what to do next. The research behind both is real. The published trials tested a whole school approach called RULER, which includes the Mood Meter. They tested that approach as a package.

What the Mood Meter is for

The chart has two lines. Pleasantness runs across, from unpleasant to pleasant. Energy runs up the side, from low to high. The lines make four colors.

• Red: high energy, unpleasant. Anger, anxiety, frustration.
• Yellow: high energy, pleasant. Excitement, joy, enthusiasm.
• Blue: low energy, unpleasant. Sadness, tiredness, disappointment.
• Green: low energy, pleasant. Calm, content, relaxed.

Dr. Marc Brackett and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence built this chart as one tool inside RULER. RULER names five skills: recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate. Schools that use RULER teach the Mood Meter with three other tools: the Charter, the Meta-Moment, and the Blueprint (Brackett, 2019; Brackett, Bailey, Hoffmann, & Simmons, 2019; Nathanson, Rivers, Flynn, & Brackett, 2016).

A color is the start. The skill is a precise word, then a choice. Keep this feeling, or shift it.

Why the chart is drawn this way

Psychologists have sorted feelings along pleasantness and energy for decades. James A. Russell’s circumplex model of affect is the map the Mood Meter uses (Russell, 1980).

Why the word matters, especially for teenagers

Putting a specific word on a feeling can turn the intensity down. In brain studies with adults, labeling an emotion reduced amygdala activity compared with other ways of looking at the same picture (Lieberman et al., 2007). A later review treats that kind of labeling as a form of emotion regulation (Torre & Lieberman, 2018).

Teenagers are in a stretch of life when feelings are strong and the words for them are often blunt. A study that followed people from age 5 to 25 found that the ability to tell similar feelings apart drops from childhood into adolescence, then rises again toward adulthood (Nook, Sasse, Lambert, McLaughlin, & Somerville, 2018). In a year-long study of adolescents, those who could make finer distinctions were less likely to slide into anxiety and depression after stressful events (Nook, Flournoy, Rodman, Mair, & McLaughlin, 2021).

Regulation, in the research sense, is choosing a strategy on purpose. The goal might be to settle for a test, or to keep the energy for a game (Gross, 2015). The Mood Meter is the step before that choice. You see where you are. You name it. Then you decide.

What the school trials measured

The outcome studies tested RULER in classrooms. The Mood Meter was part of that work, along with the other tools and the feeling-word lessons.

In grades 5 and 6, a 30-week feeling-words curriculum in 15 classrooms was compared with classrooms that did not use it. The RULER students had higher year-end grades and higher teacher ratings of social and emotional skills, including leadership, social skills, and study skills. This was a pre-and-post comparison of 273 students (Brackett, Rivers, Reyes, & Salovey, 2012).

A separate randomized trial assigned 62 schools to RULER or to their usual English language arts classes, again in grades 5 and 6. Observers rated RULER classrooms as warmer and more connected. Students had more say and more leadership, and teachers paid more attention to students’ interests (Rivers, Brackett, Reyes, Elbertson, & Salovey, 2013). By the end of the second year, those classrooms also showed stronger emotional support, clearer organization, and stronger instructional support. The emotional shift in year 1 partly explained the later gains (Hagelskamp, Brackett, Rivers, & Salovey, 2013).

In 37 Mexican high schools, students and teachers rated school climate before RULER, after one year, and after two years. Teaching quality, relationships, discipline, support for social and emotional learning, student voice, respect for diversity, and school satisfaction improved (Baumsteiger, Hoffmann, Castillo-Gualda, & Brackett, 2022). That study followed schools as they took up the approach. It measured climate.

Yale is running a randomized efficacy trial of High School RULER for grades 9 to 12. Those results are not published yet. The trial page is on the Yale Child Study Center site.

Where role-play fits

RULER lessons ask students to take a feeling word into a real situation. A scene from their own week. A character in a book. A short role-play. Then they choose a strategy for that feeling. The role-play is the practice. The Mood Meter is the map they practice on.

The broad evidence for that kind of practice comes from reviews of school social and emotional programs. A meta-analysis of 213 programs and 270,034 students in kindergarten through high school found gains in skills, attitudes, behavior, and achievement. Programs did better when they were sequenced, active, focused, and explicit. Active practice included role-play and rehearsing the skill (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). Follow-up studies found that many of those gains held up months and years later (Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017). A 2023 review of 424 studies in 53 countries found the same pattern. Students in these programs improved, and the way a program is built and taught changes how large the improvement is (Cipriano et al., 2023).

One randomized pilot taught emotion regulation directly to adolescents and used role-play as one of the two practice methods. Eighty-five students in grades 6 to 8, ages 12 to 15, learned the same emotion-regulation lesson. Half practiced in role-play. Half practiced in immersive virtual reality. Three months later, several emotion-regulation scores inside the role-play group had moved by a small amount. The virtual-reality group came to more sessions, had an easier time calling up a strategy, and reported a little more confidence in handling feelings (Hadley et al., 2019). Role-play was a real way to practice. In this pilot it was the comparison, and virtual reality edged it.

A sentence you can stand on

The Mood Meter gives adolescents a shared map and a precise word for a feeling. Role-play is one way these lessons have students practice the next step, which is keeping that feeling or shifting it. The published school results are for the full RULER approach. A grade 9–12 efficacy trial is still in progress.

Use it in a classroom

A morning check-in on a wall chart is the usual start. Read how schools use the Mood Meter in a classroom. A room that needs the chart itself can hang the Mood Meter on photo paper.

References

Baumsteiger, R., Hoffmann, J. D., Castillo-Gualda, R., & Brackett, M. A. (2022). Enhancing school climate through social and emotional learning: Effects of RULER in Mexican secondary schools. Learning Environments Research, 25, 465–483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-021-09374-x

Brackett, M. A. (2019). Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. Celadon Books.

Brackett, M. A., Bailey, C. S., Hoffmann, J. D., & Simmons, D. N. (2019). RULER: A theory-driven, systemic approach to social, emotional, and academic learning. Educational Psychologist, 54(3), 144–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1614447

Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., Reyes, M. R., & Salovey, P. (2012). Enhancing academic performance and social and emotional competence with the RULER feeling words curriculum. Learning and Individual Differences, 22(2), 218–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2010.10.002

Cipriano, C., Strambler, M. J., Naples, L. H., Ha, C., Kirk, M., Wood, M., Sehgal, K., Zieher, A. K., Eveleigh, A., McCarthy, M., Funaro, M., Ponnock, A., Chow, J. C., & Durlak, J. (2023). The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions. Child Development, 94(5), 1181–1204. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13968

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01564.x

Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781

Hadley, W., Houck, C., Brown, L. K., Spitalnick, J. S., Ferrer, M., & Barker, D. (2019). Moving beyond role-play: Evaluating the use of virtual reality to teach emotion regulation for the prevention of adolescent risk behavior within a randomized pilot trial. Journal of Pediatric Psychology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30551157/

Hagelskamp, C., Brackett, M. A., Rivers, S. E., & Salovey, P. (2013). Improving classroom quality with the RULER Approach to social and emotional learning: Proximal and distal outcomes. American Journal of Community Psychology, 51(3–4), 530–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-013-9570-x

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Nathanson, L., Rivers, S. E., Flynn, L. M., & Brackett, M. A. (2016). Creating emotionally intelligent schools with RULER. Emotion Review, 8(4), 305–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916650495

Nook, E. C., Flournoy, J. C., Rodman, A. M., Mair, P., & McLaughlin, K. A. (2021). High emotion differentiation buffers against internalizing symptoms following exposure to stressful life events in adolescence: An intensive longitudinal study. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(4), 699–718. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620979786

Nook, E. C., Sasse, S. F., Lambert, H. K., McLaughlin, K. A., & Somerville, L. H. (2018). The nonlinear development of emotion differentiation: Granular emotional experience is low in adolescence. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1346–1357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618773357

Rivers, S. E., Brackett, M. A., Reyes, M. R., Elbertson, N. A., & Salovey, P. (2013). Improving the social and emotional climate of classrooms: A clustered randomized controlled trial testing the RULER Approach. Prevention Science, 14(1), 77–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11121-012-0305-2

Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.6.1161

Taylor, R. D., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school-based social and emotional learning interventions: A meta-analysis of follow-up effects. Child Development, 88(4), 1156–1171. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12864

Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706