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Enhancing emotional competencies and explore its’ effect on self-efficacy, and resilience of high school students- An intervention study

Rama Sundari Nag

Introduction: Emotional competencies can be defined as a 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. 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), an instrument's competencies can be assessed 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 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 socioemotional transition, is crucial for development.
The child once entering this phase requires intensive readjustment to school, social, and family life. Social and emotional learning, which involves enhancing students' social and emotional competencies in schools, is an appropriate way of dealing with such mental health issues. Self-efficacy is seen as an essential element that contributes to an adolescent’s wellbeing. Meyer and Kim (2000) supported this, which stated self-efficacy is a psychological mediator of health and academic accomplishment of 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 the present study to enhance emotional competencies through intervention in adolescents and explore whether enhancing emotional competencies predict more self-efficacy and resilience of adolescents. The research design used in the present study is pre and post-test intervention group design to find out the impact of the intervention on emotional competencies among adolescents. 

Methodology: 
Hypotheses: 
• There will be a significant enhancement in the emotional competencies of adolescents due to intervention. 
• There will be a positive relationship between emotional competencies, self-efficacy, and resilience of adolescents. 
• There will be a positive impact of emotional competencies on self-efficacy and resilience after the 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 the Emotional competencies inventory by Boyatzis, Goleman, and Rhee (1999)., the Self-efficacy questionnaire for children by Muris (2001), and the Resilience scale by Wagnild-Young, (1987).

After taking permission from the school principals the pretesting was conducted on the students. These students’ scores in the 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 analyzing the connections between behavior, thoughts, and emotions. For the intervention, activities from the book by Shaul, J., (2017) were adopted and modified to suit the selected sample and objectives. The intervention schedule was eight sessions with 15 days gap between sessions. Each session is 45 mts. After the intervention was completed post-test was conducted on 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 a better understanding of emotional competencies in 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.