Development of emotional competencies in high school students through a psychoeducational approach

Abstract

According to the Integral Higher Average Education (RIEMS) reform, educating competence require educators to rethink educational purposes and modify the established knowledge to include others that make more sense and serve for the life of the student. This involves thinking about the emotional education as an innovative alternative to the development of emotional competence affecting the welfare of the learner. This work shows a prior study carried out in the Centre of Secondary Education of the uaa which sought to develop two emotional competencies: the consciousness of self and emotional self-regulation in a group of 40 sixth-semester students who took the elective course of Humanistic Psychology in the year 2013. It was applied a psychoeducational treatment under the light of the principles and tenets of the Gestalt psychotherapy and emotional education, with a measurement test-retest, using the scale tmms - 24, a questionnaire specifically built to measure awareness of self, as well as auto reports from students about their learning experiences. The results showed a statistically significant increase in the domain of these emotional competencies; these, contrasted with other studies, allowed to affirm that the intervention was successful to encourage these skills, resulting in an improvement of the participants adaptation to their environment, recognizing an impact on the emotional autonomy and other skills for life and well-being which were not directly worked during the intervention.