Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy
Open Access

Abstract

Enhancing Emotional Competencies and explore its

Rama Sundari Nag

Emotional competencies can be defined as combination of skills and abilities that individual puts to use to perceive accurately, appraise, and express, regulate and understand emotions. It shows the individual’s ability to demonstrate emotionally intelligent behavior. The emotional intelligence is the behavior that requires emotional and behavioral control in social situations (Kanfer &Kantrowitz,2002). The work of Boyatzis, Goleman, and Rhee (1999), designed a framework for the clustering of emotional competencies. According to Wolff (2005), the competencies can be assessed by an instrument based on this framework, the Emotional and Social Competencies Inventory (ESCI).

 

Emotional intelligence competencies allow people to gain insight into their emotional state, regulate their moods effectively, and build their emotional resources, help people to relate confidently and empathically to others, (Salovey et al. 2002; Frederickson 2001). Strong positive relationships have been found between emotional intelligence and several positive outcomes such as physical and psychological health and life satisfaction (Salovey et al. 2002; Carmeli and Josman 2006; Mikolajczak et al. 2006). The important role is played by emotional intelligence in enhancing the resilience and psychological wellbeing (Kinman and Grant 2011).

Self-efficacy is a perceived belief concerning the level of competence that a person expects he or she will display in a given situation (Bandura, 1997).  Self-efficacy has a significant influence on human achievement in a wide variety of settings, including education, health, sports, and work (Bandura, 1997). Self-efficacy strongly influences the choices people make, the effort they expend and their perseverance in the face of challenge (Bandura,1986), Self-efficacy beliefs influence task choice, effort, persistence, resilience and achievement (Britner & Pajares, 2006).

Adolescence, a period of physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional transition, is a crucial age for development. The child once entering in this phase requires intensive readjustment to school, social, and family life. Social and emotional learning, which involves enhancing social and emotional competencies of students in schools, has been found to be an appropriate way of dealing with such mental health issues. Self-efficacy is seen as an essential element that contributes to an adolescent’s well-being. This is supported by Meyer and Kim (2000) which stated self-efficacy is a psychological mediator of health and academic accomplishment of the adolescents.

Resilience is a complex and multi- faceted construct (Grant and Kinman 2013). The term resilience reflects ‘emotional stamina’ (Wagnild and Young,1990.) The ability to “recover” from adversity, react appropriately, or “bounce back” when life gets tough. Resilience is not an innate or fixed characteristic but can be developed through carefully targeted interventions (McAllister and McKinnon 2008; McDonald et al. 2010: Beddoe et al. 2013). 

Limited research has been done to study the association between emotional competencies, self efficacy, and resilience of adolescent students.

 

PRESENT STUDY:

The aim of present study To enhance emotional competencies through intervention in adolescents and explore whether enhancing emotional competencies predict more self-efficacy and resilience of adolescents. Research design used in the present study is pre and post-test intervention group design to find out the impact of intervention on emotional competencies among adolescents.

METHODOLOGY:

Hypotheses:

There will be a significant enhancement in emotional competencies of adolescents due to intervention. There will be a positive relation between emotional competencies, self-efficacy and resilience of adolescents. There will be a positive impact of emotional competencies on self-efficacy and resilience after intervention. There will be no significant gender differences in emotional competencies, self-efficacy and resilience of adolescents.

Sample: The sample of 259 high school students aged 13-15 years are selected from three schools randomly drawn from different English medium schools of East Hyderabad for the pre-test. Measuring instruments are Emotional competencies inventory by Boyatzis, Goleman and Rhee (1999)., Self-efficacy questionnaire for children by Muris (2001) and Resilience scale by Wagnild-Young, (1987). After taking permission from the school principals the pre-testing was conducted on the students. These students’ scores in Emotional and Social Competencies inventory’ were categorized into low, medium and high scores in the 12 competencies based on percentiles. The 198 low and medium scorers were further divided into experimental (99 students) and control groups (99 students).

Description of the intervention: -

The objective of the intervention is to enhance the emotional competencies of the adolescents through increasing emotional awareness, and regulation and by changing the painful emotion to pleasant emotion based on the principles of emotion focused therapy (Greenberg, L. S.2004). The techniques used in this intervention to enhance emotional competencies are guided observation, mindful experiencing and analysing the connections between behaviour, thoughts and emotions. For the intervention, activities from book by Shaul, J., (2017) were adopted, and modified to suit the selected sample and objectives. The intervention schedule were eight sessions with 15 days gap between sessions. Each session is 45 mts. After intervention completed post test was conducted to experimental and control groups. The data was collected. Means, correlation and paired t test were calculated.

 

RESULTS:  Most of the emotional competencies are positively related to three components of self-efficacy and resilience. The paired t test shows there is a highly significant difference in the means of pre-post test scores of all twelve emotional competencies, emotional self-efficacy and resilience of adolescents. whereas the control group students’ did not show significant differences in pre-post test scores.

DISCUSSION:  This study provides vital empirical information for better understanding the of emotional competencies on adolescents and could be inculcated in the curriculum in the institutions. Further research into these competencies and can be trained as per the specific requirement of the sample. These competencies need to be developed for our children to be successful not only in school but in life. They are particularly important for adolescents to develop because they are linked to a variety of behaviors with long-term implications.

Received Date: 2020-09-18