The Effect Of Grateful Intervention On The Psychological Theory And Prosocial Behavior Of Junior High School Students

Gratitude is a noble personality quality and a positive energy. It is also a stable emotional tendency, which has become an important research field of positive psychology. The function of gratitude mainly reflects in two aspects:mental function which means that gratitude can improve individual psychological function, and social function which means that gratitude can inspire people's reciprocal behavior, building rich individual and social resources as well as promoting the harmonious development of society (Tian Rong,2011). In the nineties of the last century, psychological researchers who conducted a series of experiments and data analysis on gratitude have made a lot of progress. However domestic study on gratitude still remains at an early stage, particularly with less study on gratitude intervention. In recent years, positive psychology gradually rises. It shows that gratitude is a psychological quality to which human beings should pay special attention because it can stimulate individual's internal positive potential. Teenagers are in the critical period of personality development. Therefore carrying out gratitude intervention to them has important theoretical value and practical significance.Through group gratitude counseling on junior middle school students, this research aims to make gratitude become junior middle school students'inner psychological mechanism and form a stable gratitude tendency, thereby improving junior middle school students' ability of theory of mind and inspiring more prosocial behavior. This research uses recruitment to choose participants in a high school of Xi'an and adopts pretest and posttest design on experimental group and control group. Questionnaire of Junior School Students' Gratitude Quality made by Zhao Guoxiang et al. is used to measure gratitude. Task paradigms proposed by Shamay-Tsoory et al. are used to measure theory of mind. Questionnaire of Prosocial Tendencies made by Carlo et al. is used to measure prosocial behavior. Based on the theory of gratitude and group psychological counseling, the author consults previous research and finally works out a gratitude group counseling plan by referring to interventions proven to be effective as well as combining gratitude objects and gratitude dimensions. Experimental group receives eight-week intervention while control group studies in natural state and doesn't be intervened. SPSS 17.0 is applied to process data. The main conclusions of this research are as follows:(1)Tast of Yuanyuan is used in junior middle school students, it can measure their level of theory of mind effectively.(2)Group gratitude counseling can significantly improve junior middle school students' gratitude level.(3)Group gratitude counseling can significantly enhance junior middle school students' ability of theory of mind.(4)Group gratitude counseling can significantly increase junior middle school students' prosocial behaviors.