The Effect Of Group Counseling On College Students' Emotional Adjustment

Emotion has important influence on the mental health of college students.Emotion regulation has become a key aspect of psychological research in recent years.Mindfulness is a kind of awareness and observation ability, and it also known as putting attention and concentration on this moment. In fact, recent researches showed that, mindfulness-based training takes great effects on releasing negative emotions and enhancing positive ones.Current study contains two parts:In Study 1, 330 college students from Shanghai Normal University were taken as participants to investigate overall emotional state of college students, using PANAS(Positive and Negative Affect Scale). In the second part, a design of experimental group and control group was conducted to test the effect of the group intervention. The researcher recruited 20 college students and randomly divided into two groups. 10 participants in experimental group accepted mindfulness-based group intervention towards emotion regulation, which lasted for 8 weeks. The following questionnaires: PANAS,FFMQ(Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire), AAQ:II(The Acceptance and Action Questionnaire:II) and ERQ(Emotion Regulation Questionnaire) were used in Study 2. Paired-samples T-tests were operated to find out significant differences between the pretest scores and the posttest scores in emotional state and emotion regulation strategies, comparing within two groups.Conclusions of the present study are as follows:(1) Most college students showed significantly more positive emotions.(2) There were no significant differences on gender. But significant differences appeared on age. No interaction between age and gender.(3) 8-week mindfulness-oriented group intervention effectively enhanced members’ awareness of emotions, also observing and describing ability. Group members experienced much more positive emotions and less negative emotionssignificantly. In the aspect of emotion regulation strategies, group members applied higher level of acceptance than before; however there was no significant change on suppression and reappraisal.