Body Listening and Resilience Among Elementary School Students: A Preliminary Study of the Roles of Social-Emotional Competence and Perceived Awareness

Background: This study examined the association between body listening and resilience among Korean elementary school students, focusing on the mediating role of social-emotional competence and the moderating role of perceived awareness. Methods: Participants were 78 students in Grades 3–6 from an elementary school in South Korea. Data were collected via surveys and analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, mediation analysis, and moderated mediation analysis with the jAMM module in jamovi. Results: The results show that body listening was positively associated with both social-emotional competence and resilience. Social-emotional competence was a statistically significant partial mediator of the relationship between body listening and resilience. In addition, perceived awareness was a statistically significant moderator of the relationship between body listening and social-emotional competence, such that this association was stronger at higher levels of perceived awareness. These findings suggest that body listening is associated with resilience both directly and indirectly through social-emotional competence, and the association between body listening and social-emotional competence differed according to the level of perceived awareness. Conclusion: The findings indicate that fostering social-emotional competence and resilience among elementary school students requires helping them attend to bodily sensations and recognize their current physical and mental state.