The Effect of Cognitive-Based Theory Group Counseling towards the Emotional Competence of Freshmen Undergraduate Students

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to study the effect of Cognitive-Based Theory group counseling towards emotional competence of freshmen undergraduate students. The samples of this study were twenty-four freshmen undergraduate students at Burapha University who enrolled in Psychology for Quality of Life course. Twelve samples were randomly assigned into experimental group and the other twelve samples were placed into the control group. The instruments were an Emotional Competence test and the Cognitive-Based Theory group counseling program. Subjects in the experimental group received ten times of forty-five up to sixty minute sessions of the counseling, whereas those in the control group received no treatment. Statistics for data analysis was Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with the intervention of one variable repeated between the groups and one variable repeated within the group, and then the differences between the particular pair of interventions were compared by using Newman-Keuls test.

The results showed that the experimental group had higher emotional competence than the control group during the intervention, at the significance level of .05 (p > .05). Additionally, after the intervention and the follow-up phases, the experiment group still maintained their higher competence at the significance level of .05 (p > .05). According to these results, the Cognitive-Based Theory group counseling revealed an explicit effect towards the increase of the emotional competence levels of the freshmen undergraduate students.