兒童與青少年諮商中的情緒陶冶改變歷程

Although research has provided empirical support for the effectiveness of group psychotherapy, researchers still need to understand the process of how changes occur and their underlying mechanisms through increasingly complex hypotheses or complex analytic models. We attempted to adapt Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory (i.e., the broaden effect, the build effect, and the upward spiral effect) as a guiding framework to examine the process of how positive emotions or positive relations and emotional cultivation mutually influence one another to create a series of upward spirals toward greater well-being over the course of group interventions. A total of 196 Taiwanese children and adolescent clients across 33 groups participated in an 8-session emotional regulation group intervention. The random intercepts cross-lagged panel model was used for the data analyses in Mplus. Overall, our results supported the broaden-and-build theory and its broaden-, build-, and upward-spiral effects with an exception of positive affect. Specifically, results supported that positive emotions (i.e., gratitude and psychological need satisfaction) and positive relations (i.e., teacher-student relationship and perceived social support) predicted future improvements on emotional cultivation (i.e., the broaden effects). Results also supported that the improved emotional cultivation was a durable resource and could be drawn upon at later moments for the enhancement of greater positive emotions and relations (i.e., the build effects). Together, results supported that the build effects later triggered an upward or adaptive spiral to mutually influence one another over time before group, during group, after group, and at one-month follow-up.