The Living SEB Skills Project

The article The Living SEB Skills Project has been published in the European Journal of Personality. It focuses on the scientific study of social, emotional, and behavioral competencies, often referred to as soft skills. The work is based on the Social, Emotional, and Behavioral skills model (SEB skills), a recent framework that represents an important step toward studying soft skills in a clearer, more integrated, and more measurable way.
The field of soft skills has long been characterized by different models, definitions that do not always overlap, and an often unclear distinction between competencies and personality traits. The SEB model provides a common foundation for addressing these issues: it defines skills as functional capacities, that is, what people are able to do in specific situations, distinguishing them from what people typically tend to do, which instead concerns personality traits.
Precisely because soft skills are now attracting growing educational, social, and applied interest, it is important for research to proceed in a rigorous and cumulative way. When a field grows rapidly, knowledge can become fragmented: individual studies may receive excessive attention, preliminary findings may be overinterpreted, reviews can quickly become outdated, and selective citations may offer only a partial picture of the evidence.
These risks are particularly relevant in psychology, also in light of the debate surrounding the replication crisis.
A further aspect concerns potential conflicts of interest. Soft skills are also connected to assessment tools, educational interventions, training programs, and institutional decisions.
For this reason, it is important that evidence be open, verifiable, and updateable, so as to better distinguish between robust findings, premature interpretations, and claims supported by still limited evidence.
To address these issues, the article presents the Living SEB Skills Project, an open and continuously updated resource that collects, organizes, and synthesizes research based on the SEB model and the BESSI instruments. The project combines monthly literature searches, an open database containing information on studies and effect sizes, and a free web app that allows users to explore the literature, visualize data, conduct customized meta-analyses, and download datasets and reports.
The project aims to make knowledge about soft skills more accessible, transparent, and reusable for researchers, reviewers, editors, practitioners, and people interested in the topic. In this sense, the Living SEB Skills Project offers an infrastructure for a science of soft skills that is more open, cumulative, and useful even beyond academia.

Feraco, T., Calderan, M., & Pellegrino, G. (2026). The Living SEB Skills Project: A living resource for review and meta-analysis of social, emotional, and behavioral skills. European Journal of Personality. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070261467477